ScaleReady awards a $300,000 G-Rex® Grant to A2 Biotherapeutics, Inc.

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ST. PAUL, Minn., May 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- ScaleReady, in collaboration with Wilson Wolf, Bio-Techne Corporation and CellReady, today announced that A2 Biotherapeutics, Inc. ("A2") has been awarded a $300,000 G-Rex® Grant.  A2's G-Rex® Grant will enable expeditious process development and qualification of a G-Rex-based production system and will enable A2 to evaluate G-Rex for manufacturing cell therapies.

"We are very impressed by the simplicity and scalability of the G-Rex platform and look forward to exploring its applications in our clinical development programs." says Dr. Agi Hamburger, Chief Operating Officer at A2. "As an early-stage company, the G-Rex Grant provides valuable resources to support the process development and comparability studies."

"We appreciate the opportunity to help A2 Biotherapeutics explore an alternative manufacturing pathway that is distinct from the 'all-in-one' bioreactor approach.  We believe a modular and flexible closed approach is necessary for cell therapy developers to set the basis for LEAN manufacturing while establishing phase appropriate production. This is the best way to generate drug product supply that is commensurate with their total patient demand," says John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Wolf and co-inventor of G-Rex.

As part of the G-Rex Grant, A2 will evaluate the G-CART process, a standardized workflow for assembling CAR-T drug product, currently in development at Cell Ready, the world's first and only G-Rex centric contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO). The G-CART process is designed for high-throughput manufacturing in centralized or point of care models and will be readily adaptable to full end-to-end robotic automation for commercial scale production.  The G-CART process will make creative use of novel sub-assemblies to streamline the flow of the drug substance through the final assembly line, including the new GMP ProPak cytokines from Bio-Techne.  ProPaks are GMP grade, liquid formulated, process-sized cytokines filled in sterile-weldable bags tailormade for use with the G-Rex device.  Various interleukins, including IL-2, IL-7, and IL-15 are available in ProPak form.

A2's CAR-T cell pipeline is based on their proprietary Tmod™ platform. The Tmod platform is a dual-signal integrator system for cancer cell therapy that consists of an activating receptor and an inhibitory receptor (blocker module). It utilizes tumor loss of heterozygosity to clearly distinguish normal cells containing both the activator and blocker antigens from tumor cells expressing the activator antigen, but which have irreversibly lost the blocker antigen.  A2's current clinical pipeline consists of CAR-T cell therapies targeting various solid tumor indications including colorectal, lung, pancreatic, and ovarian cancers.