Based in Wallonia, Cellistic develops large-scale cell therapies aimed at treating onco-immune diseases.
Wallonia is home to many companies active in the biotechnology sector. Among them is Cellistic, located in Mont-Saint-Guibert. Cellistic is setting a new standard in cell therapy by enabling companies to create off-the-shelf, affordable treatments with significantly reduced development time and cost.
“We offer the development of cell lines and scalable GMP manufacturing platforms to produce allogeneic cell therapies derived from iPSCs, with a focus on immune effector cells. These include NK cells, T cells, macrophages, and others that our clients and partners wish to use to treat various types of cancers, including both liquid and solid tumors. Nowadays, some are also targeting autoimmune diseases,” explains Tarran Pierfelice, Chief Commercial Officer at Cellistic.
The company’s goal? To make cell therapies accessible. “We know that cell therapies work. They’ve treated patients who had no other options left. Terminal cancer patients have been treated and cured. But historically, these have been autologous cell therapies. That means one batch treats one patient—it’s personalized medicine. The issue with autologous therapies is that you can't produce them in large quantities quickly. That makes it hard to reach patients promptly. It’s also very expensive. Our solution to these problems is to use iPSCs, or induced pluripotent stem cells, to derive allogeneic cell therapies: we can take cells from a single donor, reprogram them into induced pluripotent stem cells, and then scalably differentiate them into the desired cell type under GMP. When done this way, you can produce large batches of an allogeneic cell therapy that is off-the-shelf enabling the treatment of hundreds of patients with a single batch while significantly reducing your production costs,” elaborates Tarran Pierfelice.
Cellistic’s added value lies in its exclusive focus on iPSCs. “Unlike our competitors who spread their development and manufaturing services across multiple modalities like biologics, autologous cell therapies, gene therapies, and then also allogeneic cell therapies, we at Cellistic are singularly focused on iPSCs-based allogeneic cell therapies for more than 15 years—bringing unmatched depth, precision, and expertise to every program,” notes Tarran Pierfelice.
This week, Cellistic is attending the Bio International Convention. “BIO is one of the best conferences of the year. It really brings together all the decision-makers and business development leaders, from small biotech firms to large pharmaceutical groups. For Cellistic, our goal is to connect with our current partners and also meet new potential collaborators,” concludes Tarran Pierfelice.
Isabelle Anneet (AWEX)