Earlier this week, integrated development and manufacturing organization (IDMO) Cellares

announced the closing

of its latest Series-D funding round, co-led by BlackRock and Eclipse. The Series D raised US$257 million and added more global investors, totaling $612 million in capital.

The funding will support the construction of automated “smart factories” in South San Francisco, California; Bridgewater, New Jersey; Leiden, Netherlands; and Kashiwa City, Japan. The company says these factories will allow for fully automated, unrestricted manufacturing of cell therapies.

“South San Francisco is where we invent and develop our technologies and conduct clinical-scale manufacturing,” commented CEO and co-founder of Cellares Fabian Gerlinghaus to

BioProcess Insider.

“Bridgewater, New Jersey, is our first commercial-scale US facility, already built and operational. Leiden [will] serve Europe and support our Bristol Myers Squibb partnership, and Kashiwa City addresses Asia-Pacific demand.” He added, “Each location satisfies regional regulatory requirements and keeps manufacturing close to patients.”

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According to the

company’s website

, its Cell Shuttle and Cell-Q platforms allow closed-system, end-to-end automated production of cellular therapies. In April 2024,

Cellares announced

a $380 million contract with Bristol Myers Squibb to use its technology to manufacture chimeric antigen receptor

(CAR) T-cell therapies

. The partnership hopes to address persistent problems in scaling cell therapies.

“Technology transfer is where global manufacturing typically breaks,” explained Gerlinghaus. “Because Cell Shuttles execute identical, software-controlled automation across our network of IDMO smart factories, a process qualified in South San Francisco runs the same in New Jersey, Leiden, or Japan.”

Several new investors contributed to Cellares in its latest series-D funding, with hopes to support clinical manufacturing in the first half of 2026 and launch commercial manufacturing in 2027.

“The $257 million Series D, co-led by BlackRock and Eclipse with participation from T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, Duquesne Family Office, Intuitive Ventures, EDBI, and Gates Frontier, provides the capital to scale the industrial backbone needed to deliver cell therapies globally,” added Gerlinghaus. “This financing puts Cellares on a clear, disciplined path toward becoming a public company in Q4 of 2027.”

Cellares’s operational factories in San Francisco and Bridgewater are cGMP compliant and can produce over 41,000 patient doses per year, but the company hopes to increase this.

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“The entire industry produced just over 10,000 patient doses last year across approved therapies. Each of our smart factories can produce up to 75,000 patient doses annually, depending on process duration,” elaborated Gerlinghaus. “We offer the lowest cost of manufacturing in the industry, which gives pharma companies room to negotiate pricing with insurers.”