Freeze variability, not progress: strengthen your cell therapy supply chain from the start

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from LaViaTech. My name is Dylan Kossain, and this is episode 197 for the podcast. Today, we're digging into a topic that's getting a lot more attention lately. How early decisions in cell therapy end up shaping or complicating everything that comes later. Our episode today is freeze variability, not progress, how to strengthen your cell therapy supply chain from the start, and we're going to challenge a few long held beliefs about how starting material should be handled. My guest today is Dominic Clark, vice president of technical operations for IntegraCell at Cryoport Systems. Dominic has spent years in the trenches building and scaling cell therapy processes from early development through commercialization. So we've seen where things break and what actually works. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dominic Clark. Dominic, it's great to have you here today. We know Cryoport Systems well here at Beyond Biotech, but for anyone tuning in who might be new, can you give us a quick refresher on what Cryoport Systems focuses on and maybe tell us a little bit about IntegraCell and how it fits into the bigger picture? Yeah. Absolutely. And, yeah, first of all, thank you for having me here today as we, you know, dive deeper into the industry norms and and challenging some of those norms for the cell therapy supply chain. You know, as, as you said, you know, Cryopore Systems is a global leader in temperature controlled supply chain solutions for the advanced therapies. We support the full vein to vein journey, to protect irreplaceable materials, but, you know, it's because of that end to end visibility that we see firsthand where variability and risk actually commonly enter the system. And it's this unique position that allows us to translate those direct insights into our solutions and best partner with our customers to enable patient access at a global scale. IntegraCell is the part of the is a is a part of that complete platform that focuses specifically on the incoming patient starting material. IntegraCell essentially enables consistent cryopreservation of leukapheresis starting material through a standardized automated platform or process that we've developed and put in place. And our goal within IntegraCell and across all of cryoport systems is to simply, you know, build a reliable foundation that supports the development, the scale up, and certainly the most important, you know, aspect is long term success for our customers. And before we get into the technical side of things, I'd love to give listeners a sense of what you personally focus on. Where do you spend most of your time at IntegraCell? You know, I may maybe I'll just kinda step back for a second and and maybe it'll help to understand. And so my and I've been a I've been living and breathing, selling gene therapies, my entire working career. And, you know, I would say that, you know, I don't know if this is …