Shinobi Therapeutics announced a partnership with Panasonic Holdings Corp. and Kyoto University's Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA). Through this strategic collaboration, the organizations aim to engineer a novel manufacturing platform to produce iPS-T cell therapies more efficiently and at lower cost than is possible with currently available technology.

Cell therapies have shown remarkable promise in treating blood cancers and other intractable diseases, but manufacturing costs render these therapies inaccessible to many patients around the world. Shinobi's iPS-T cell technology, built upon a decade's worth of iPSC research pioneered at CiRA by Shinobi co-founder Shin Kaneko using iPSCs originally created by Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka, will be used to support the creation of a closed-system manufacturing device created by Panasonic, opening up an entirely new paradigm for cell therapy production. The newly announced partnership will leverage Panasonic's manufacturing expertise to develop a new method of producing iPS-T cell therapies in a closed-system process.

The first phase of the partnership will be completed in April 2025, when the companies expect to release the initial prototype.