In the future of cell and gene therapy, the University of Pittsburgh doesn't just want to be ahead of the curve in the research innovations and clinical leaps that will make a difference in patients' lives. Pitt BioForge Biomanufacturing Center, the new center at Mill 19 that is being funded with $100 million from the Richard K. Mellon Foundation, is going to focus its efforts on scaling up and making more affordable the manufacturing process.
That's the vision of the new $120 million BioForge Manufacturing Center, which was announced in 2022 to house not only gene/cell therapy maker ElevateBio's facility but also a university center to support the region's goal of becoming a biotech leader. About 70% of the 185,000-square-foot center, which is in the beginning stages of construction, will go to anchor tenant Elevate Bio that will have about 170 jobs when everything opens in a few years. The rest will be for Pitt's Advanced Biomanufacturing Institute, who in January named Akustica founder and former Draper Labs CEO Ken Gabriel as its inaugural CEO.
Gabriel has hit the ground running. The former Carnegie Mellon University engineering professor sees a niche at Pitt for the development and refining of the processes around the scaled production of cell and gene therapies that will be developed at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, not the cell and gene therapies themselves.
"Those new manufacturing approaches are going to have to be more automated, more sensor controlled, more programmable," Gabriel told the Business Times in a recent interview. "More AI and more machine learning has to be involved with that."
That's going to be important as the future of medicine involves personalized treatment, the cell and gene therapies that create drugs that are designed for a patient's body and disease. It's more expensive and the process is more involved than the mass-produced drugs of the past, which are called small molecules. Instead of making a million of a drug in a facility, cell and gene therapies are made in much smaller batches and likely regionally instead of at a big faraway plant.
Making those cell therapies affordable and at the right volume are what the Advanced Biomanufacturing Institute's efforts will be focused.
"BioForge is not going to be about creating new biological medicines," Gabriel said.
Gabriel, who has extensive engineering and government experience, sees the institute's mission as taking cell and gene therapy ideas generated by Pitt and then focusing on the nuts and bolts of making them.
"We can't take all of them (the ideas generated), but some of the promising ones, particularly the ones that are limited by the things we can contribute in manufacturing," Gabriel said.
That includes areas where experts in autonomous systems, machine learning and AI, and mechanical engineering, among others, will collaborate over the course of 18 months to 36 months with the researchers who created the innovation in the first place. That's key, said Gabriel. This requires the involvement of the original researchers throughout the process.
"We're going to do this together, we'll support you," Gabriel said. "We'll give you the facility space, but you're going to be there with us doing the transition."
