At industry conferences in the late 2010s, Fabian Gerlinghaus kept hearing the same
thing repeated like a distress signal: pharmaceutical executives and oncologists,
standing at podiums, pleading openly for fully automated, fully closed, scalable
cell therapy manufacturing. CAR-T therapies had been approved by the FDA. The science
worked. Patients were dying anyway - on waitlists, while doses sat unmade.
Nobody was building the factory. Gerlinghaus decided to.
The path from aerospace engineering at the Technical University of Munich to running
a bioprocessing company in South San Francisco was not exactly straight. After a stint
as a visiting researcher at Stanford working on haptic teleoperation of robots in
space - which he later admitted he never took seriously - he joined a four-person
CRISPR startup called Synthego in 2014. Over the next five and a half years,
he rose to Chief Innovation Officer, co-invented the company's proprietary RNA
synthesizer, and helped grow the team from a garage to 240+ people. He took a
device from whiteboard sketch to production-ready instrument in two years.
The discipline of that process - understand the requirements, engineer the system,
iterate with data - stayed with him. When he left Synthego in January 2019 and
sat down with former colleague Omar Kurdi in downtown Palo Alto to
talk about what to build next, both men kept arriving at the same problem. They
co-founded Cellares in April 2019. By August, they had their first capital. By 2021,
they had a working Cell Shuttle prototype and $100M raised.
The Cell Shuttle is, as Gerlinghaus once put it, "a factory-in-a-box."
Unlike competitors who spent six years building a single benchtop instrument
automating one manufacturing step, Cellares engineered all of them - every unit
operation in cell therapy production, for up to 16 independent patient batches,
simultaneously. The skeptics were loud. The investors pushed back. The customers
raised eyebrows. Gerlinghaus and his team shipped it anyway.
The company's Early Access Partnership Program (EAPP) was part of the reason the
Cell Shuttle worked the way it did. Rather than building a platform in a vacuum,
Cellares solicited detailed process documentation from biotech and cancer center
partners upfront - critical quality attributes, equipment specifications, success
criteria - before a single machine was assembled. It was engineering by contract.
In August 2023, Gerlinghaus unveiled the world's first IDMO - Integrated Development
and Manufacturing Organization - along with Cellares' pioneering smart factory.
In April 2024, Bristol Myers Squibb signed a $380M global manufacturing agreement
for CAR-T production across the US, Europe, and Japan. The FDA granted Cellares'
Cell Shuttle its Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) designation - the first
ever for a cell therapy manufacturing platform. TIME magazine named it one of
2025's most important inventions.
In January 2026, Cellares closed a $257M Series D led by BlackRock and Eclipse,
with new investors including T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, and Gates Frontier.
Total funding: $630M. Gerlinghaus announced plainly that the company is on a
"clear, disciplined path toward becoming a public company." Commercial-scale
manufacturing targets 2027.
His math is straightforward: Cellares factories produce as many therapies as ten
manual facilities with just 10% of the staff. Manufacturing costs drop up to 50%.
Time to IND application falls from 16 months to roughly 8. CAR-T therapies that
cost over $300,000 per dose to produce become economically viable at the scale
patients actually need.
"You need to understand the requirements," Gerlinghaus has said of building
life-science tools without necessarily being a biologist, "and then be good at
mechanical engineering, software engineering, controls engineering, systems,
and electrical engineering as well as robotics." An aerospace engineer building
cancer cures is, it turns out, exactly the right person for the job.
