Cellular Origins secures $40M to expand robotic cell therapy manufacturing platform

Cellular Origins, a TTP company based in Cambridge, UK, has raised $40 million to expand development and deployment of its Constellation platform — a robotic automation system designed to scale cell therapy manufacturing by linking third-party unit operations into an integrated workflow.

The company said the technology is intended to reduce manual labor, increase throughput, and maintain biological performance during production.

The Series A financing, led by Johnson & Johnson, will support the expansion of commercial operations, integration of additional unit operations into the platform, and development of manufacturing infrastructure to meet global demand. Cellular Origins plans to broaden use of the system beyond cell therapies into the wider advanced therapies medicinal products space as it advances toward large-scale implementation.

The technology is being developed to enable the manufacture of thousands of cell therapy doses more reliably through the integration of automation- and robotics-based processes, according to the company. The company said customer interest is increasing as developers look for solutions capable of commercial-scale production without compromising process control.

This development follows earlier collaborations the company established with Johnson & Johnson and Thermo Fisher Scientific. Cellular Origins partnered with J&J to develop an automated platform for autologous CAR-T manufacturing and separately teamed with Thermo Fisher on robotic CGT production. At the time, the first installation of its Constellation system integrated with Thermo Scientific Heracell VIOS AxD CO₂ incubator technology was completed at the CGT Catapult’s Stevenage Manufacturing Innovation Centre in the UK for further validation work.