Our Science
Cell therapy has revolutionized the treatment of certain disease areas; however, challenges in scaling these therapies and generating high quality products limits their full potential. Cell therapy development and manufacturing remains complex and includes multiple cell differentiation steps that increase chances of error and can lead to low quality cells. High costs and long timelines further limit the ability of cell therapy to reach patients.
Enhancing patient accessibility to cell therapy will require overcoming the complexity of development and manufacturing processes to make cell therapy more scalable.
Introducing the TFome™: The world’s first “plug-and-play” iPSC cellular programming platform
The development of human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology has opened vast opportunities for in vitro modeling of human biology and for cell therapy applications. iPSC-derived therapies represent the next frontier of cell therapies due to the ability to generate multiple different cell types and address more diseases and therapeutic areas.
GCTx has built the world’s first complete collection of human TFs
iPSC differentiation into distinct cell types depends on various signaling pathways that ultimately converge onto transcription factors (TFs), which control the sets of genes that are active in a cell. Cell fate is determined by specific TFs acting in concert.
Our initial pipeline programs focused on gastrointestinal, neurological and immunological diseases to make a significant impact for patients
Through sophisticated multidimensional screening modalities that incorporate genome-scale experimental testing and uniquely-trained machine learning, TFome™ can identify fully optimized TF combinations to differentiate iPSCs into virtually any functional cell type. This allows for a single step, four-day stem cell differentiation process with >90% efficiency with no requirement for cell type-specific optimization for microenvironmental factors. This has not been achieved previously via conventional small-scale testing.
Through TF-based cell fate programming, TFome™ is designed to yield first-in-class and best-in-class off-the-shelf cell therapy products up to 100 times more rapidly than conventional methods of cell differentiation with improved potency, efficiency, quality and cost (SuperCells™).
GCTx is positioned to be the first company in the iPSC-based cell therapy space to pursue multiple cell products from one starting point using a similar manufacturing strategy for more accelerated development and timelines.