Farlan Veraitch
Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer
Ori Biotech
CGT Manufacturing Innovation
Thousands of patients die every year because they cannot access a new generation of revolutionary cell and gene therapies (CGT) that, for many patients, offer cures for cancer and rare diseases. These patients often tried and failed all other therapies, meaning swift access to these treatments can be a matter of life and death. However, the reality is patients who may only have days or weeks to live must deal with poor access due to high costs and low availability since there is not enough manufacturing capacity to meet the growing demand for these lifesaving therapies.
In addition, the challenges of manufacturing these often personalized therapies at commercial scale cannot be addressed by conventional pharma manufacturing strategies. Scale-out into huge facilities with lots of manual operators remains the only option. Given the cost, both public and private treatment providers must restrict coverage to only a few of the sickest patients who have failed all other treatments. The sad reality is we have cures for cancer that patients can’t get access to.
With this significant need for a solution to address the massive manufacturing problems in the CGT industry, Farlan Veraitch, PhD co-founded Ori Biotech. Farlan is an internationally recognized expert on CGT-manufacturing, with 15 years’ experience as a leading academic at University College London, pioneering innovative technologies in CGT bioprocessing.
Under Farlan’s leadership, Ori developed a proprietary, flexible manufacturing platform that closes, automates, and standardizes CGT manufacturing allowing therapeutics developers to bring products to market at commercial scale. The promise of the full stack Ori platform is to fully automate CGT manufacturing to increase throughput, improve quality, and decrease costs by combining hardware, software, and data services.
However, Farlan is not finished. He and the Ori team continue to press onward towards the goal of reducing manufacturing costs by up to 90% while increasing throughput and improving quality. Over the last year, Ori has accelerated progress towards this goal, launching collaborative programs with leading companies for supply chain and modular manufacturing innovation. Ori seeks to deliver industry-first scalability as the first step towards realizing a fully automated, large commercial-scale platform delivering these lifesaving therapies to all patients in need.
