Excellos Announces Strategic Partnership and Investment from Vitalant

Partnership to deliver enhanced donor profiles for higher potency cell therapeutics

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Excellos Inc., a cell therapy contract and development manufacturing organization (CDMO), today announced a new partnership with Vitalant, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit blood and biotherapies healthcare organizations. The strategic partnership includes an investment by Vitalant, and cell sourcing, testing and laboratory services. It also includes collaboration with the Vitalant Innovation Center, which provides scientific research and translational development expertise to bring new products and services to patients across the country.

The strategic partnership is focused on supporting organizations to develop and deliver new cell therapies and addresses major challenges in bringing therapies to patients. Cell therapy development teams will now have access to larger and better geographically distributed donors that are well-characterized for aspects including metabolic and effector function profiles. This improves therapeutic potency and reduces manufacturing costs, while reducing clinical response variability.

Commenting on the partnership, David Wellis, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Excellos, said, “This is a great opportunity for Excellos to extend its collection network across the country and to collaborate with Vitalant in several areas, including testing services and research and development at their state-of-the-art Innovation Center. Additionally, Vitalant’s investment brings financial capital to accelerate the launch of new Excellos products and services, including donor characterization through our Excellos 360 platform.”

“Through our partnership with Excellos and other innovators, Vitalant can leverage our unique capabilities and expertise to transform healthcare,” said Becky Cap, Vitalant’s Senior Vice President of Biotherapies. “We look forward to working with Excellos to help develop new technologies and therapies that improve patient access and outcomes.”

About Vitalant

Vitalant is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit blood and biotherapies healthcare organizations, providing hospitals and patients across the U.S. a safe blood supply, specialized laboratory services, transfusion medicine expertise and world-renowned research. Learn more about our healthcare solutions at vitalanthealth.org.

About Excellos

Excellos provides custom cGMP services to develop and manufacture cell therapies. Featuring proprietary cell characterization technologies, Excellos reduces variabilities in clinical responses and increases the probability of successful outcomes. Current applications support TIL-based therapies, autologous and allogenic CAR-T/NK therapies and TCR therapies. Customized services include donor recruitment, cell isolation, transduction, expansion and scale up GMP production. Learn more at www.excellos.com.