Cell therapy manufacturing is at an inflection point. What started as a handful of clinical programs is becoming a commercial reality, and the systems supporting that manufacturing need to keep pace. This case study looks at how the housing of an automated cell therapy platform was redesigned from the ground up — moving from a development-grade manufacturing process to one built for scale, reliability, and real-world deployment.
The challenge with scaling an automated cell therapy platform
As a cell therapy automation platform moves from clinical pilots to commercial supply, the demands on every component change. The housing of this system was originally manufactured via SLS 3D printing with hand-sanding and hand-painting: a sensible choice for development, but not for scale. As the partner network across multiple clinical stages grew, two problems became impossible to ignore.
First, SLS was not economically or operationally viable at volume. Per-part costs were high, supply was inconsistent, and manual finishing introduced variability that was difficult to control. Second, the thermal behavior of the SLS housing parts limited temperature stability to a narrow ambient window, a hard constraint for many commercial manufacturing environments.
A redesign of the housing parts was needed.
Requirements that left no room for compromise
Replacement materials and manufacturing methods had to satisfy a demanding set of criteria simultaneously: biocompatibility, chemical resistance, cleanability, thermal and mechanical performance, and commercial aesthetics. Any concept that failed on one criterion was ruled out, regardless of how it performed on the others.
All design concepts incorporated an integrated insulation layer to address the thermal limitation. Thermal simulations were conducted across all candidate technologies to evaluate performance over a broader ambient range and quantify available safety margins.
Three technologies evaluated, one selected
Thermoforming, Injection Molding, and Reaction Injection Molding (RIM) were assessed against the full requirements framework. Thermoforming offered low tooling cost but was limited by geometry constraints and material options. Injection molding provided excellent repeatability and material breadth, but the tooling investment was difficult to justify at the anticipated production volumes.
RIM emerged as the most attractive option, technically and commercially. The process produces rigid polyurethane parts with tunable properties, supports complex geometries, and requires significantly lower tooling investment than injection molding. It did require additional testing around wall thickness uniformity and material compatibility, which was carried out to confirm suitability. Mechanical design was optimized across all concepts to reduce weight while maintaining structural integrity. The outermost housing includes a thermal safety margin for ventilated environments.
Following the evaluation, RIM was selected. Detailed design work was conducted in direct collaboration with a RIM tooling supplier in North America to ensure part quality and process reliability from the outset.
The outcome
The results of the redesign program were significant across every dimension that mattered:
Total cost of ownership per part reduced by up to a factor of ten
Insulation performance validated, with an expanded ambient operating range now considered feasible
Supply reliability and part consistency substantially improved through a repeatable, scalable process
Beyond the numbers, the switch to RIM changes what the platform represents to commercial-stage partners. A housing built through a validated, scalable manufacturing process signals the kind of engineering readiness that matters when a cell therapy company is choosing a platform for long-term commercial supply.
Facing a similar challenge?
Every platform has its own manufacturing constraints. If you are working through a similar industrialization challenge, we would be glad to share what we learned. Get in touch to start the conversation.