Ex­clu­sive: An in­dus­try con­sor­tium wants to stan­dard­ize cell track­ing for re­gen­er­a­tive meds. Could that avert a dis­as­ter?

In the fast-mov­ing world of re­gen­er­a­tive med­i­cine, the open se­cret among in­dus­try ex­perts is that man­u­fac­tur­ing is ex­ceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult and will take a Her­culean ef­fort to scale. Left be­hind in that shuf­fle have been new ad­vances in how drug­mak­ers ac­tu­al­ly keep track of where a pa­tients’ cells are go­ing — and that could leave the field ripe for a dis­as­ter.

As part of a broad con­sor­tium of bio­phar­ma and tech com­pa­nies work­ing to dri­ve new stan­dards for ad­vanced ther­a­pies, San Fran­cis­co’s Vineti plans to cre­ate what it calls a “mod­ern pa­tient ID” that can track hu­man cells from aphere­sis cen­ters through a com­pli­cat­ed man­u­fac­tur­ing sup­ply chain and back in­to those pa­tients.

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