CARAT Approach

CARAT is an ambitious research program uniting together Europe’s leading renowned players for clinical cell manufacturing tools (Miltenyi), CAR design, (UCL), gene-delivery technologies (UKL-FR/ PEI), cell design and translation (OSR), pre-clinical monitoring technologies (INSERM) and logistic process control (TrakCel). This unique partnership takes on the mission to deliver innovative personalized CAR therapies to cure tumour patients.

Therefore, we will integrate innovative tools and enabling technologies into a new CARAT platform (see figure below) enabling clinical researchers to safely generate in a closed and automated system genetically modified ATMPs that are specifically tailored towards cancer killing and thus provide new therapeutic options to patients with so far incurable hematologic malignancies and solid tumours like pancreas, colon or lung cancer.

CARAT platform: specific objectives. CARAT aims to deliver a novel GMP-compliant manufacturing platform for CAR T-cell products that comprises:

(a) innovative automated cell processing tools (CliniMACS Prodigy, MACSQuant Tyto);
(b) advanced enabling technologies (cell and CAR design, gene-delivery, monitoring, logistics);
(c) a new integrated CARAT process that leads to optimized generation of genetically modified CAR T-cells with superior anti-tumour efficacy and that is ready for translation into clinics.