Personalized health care with advanced therapy medicinal products, usually referred to as ATMPs, forms a milestone in the treatment of complex diseases, such as cancer. So far, these ATMP are largely produced manually, which is both time-consuming and expensive and, moreover, production is only possible for a limited number of patients. At the current time, this severely limits the availability of innovative therapeutic agents for patients who urgently need them.
In parallel with this, the most recent case of the COVID19 pandemic has shown the tremendous challenges which arise in the context of the development and subsequent production of specific vaccines to respond to novel health risks.
This is where the Fraunhofer “Production for Intelligent Medicine” innovation cluster comes in – bringing together the biological and medical know-how of the institutes in the production of cell and gene therapeutics as well as of vaccines with the expertise in automation technologies and the autonomous control of industrial processes.
Under the leadership of the Fraunhofer Institutes for Cell Therapy and Immunology IZI, Experimental Software Engineering IESE, Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME as well as Industrial Engineering IAO, the scientists are aiming to transfer automation technologies to medical research and applications in the production sector. In its first stage, the project aims to develop innovative concepts for the digital, AI-supported, robot-assisted and automatic production of pharmaceuticals as well as cell and gene therapeutics and vaccines.
Increasingly tailor-made therapeutic strategies are raising hope for improved treatment success, e.g. in oncology. In consequence, this Fraunhofer innovation project pursues the aim of dramatically increasing the availability and quality of state-of-the-art personalized cancer and immunotherapies as well as of vaccines. Moreover, automation technologies can also help in drastically reducing costs of production and, ultimately, significantly alleviate the burden on our health-care systems
Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine