Partnership has potential to provide patients with rapid and broad access to consistent, durable, HLA-compatible and transgene-free blood stem cell therapies

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. May 30, 2023 — NMDP BioTherapies℠, an organization offering solutions for companies developing and commercializing cell and gene therapies, today announced a working partnership with Garuda Therapeutics, a company working to create off-the-shelf, durable blood stem cell-based cellular therapies. NMDP BioTherapies will supply an extensive cell therapy infrastructure that provides Garuda with regulatory compliant starting material. 

 

“Our passionate goal of delivering life-changing cellular therapeutics to patients around the world necessitates stringent criteria for starting material including highly-specific HLA haplotype donors,” said Dhvanit Shah, Founder, President, & CEO of Garuda. “The vast donor registry, expertise in collection, and provision of cellular starting materials, makes NMDP BioTherapies an ideal partner to enable Garuda to source the donors needed to advance our efforts to generate off-the-shelf, self-renewing blood stem cells.” 

 

“We are proud to partner with Garuda and support their development of these potentially life changing therapies,” said Chris McClain, Senior Vice President Sales and Business Development at NMDP BioTherapies. “Together we have the opportunity to provide patients with rapid and broad access to consistent, durable, HLA-compatible and transgene-free blood stem cell therapies with the potential to address, and possibly cure, more than 120 diseases.” 

   

Throughout the past 35+ years, as part of NMDP℠, NMDP BioTherapies has sourced, collected and delivered cells from more than 100,000 volunteer allogeneic donors around the world for time-critical cellular therapies. They have extensive experience providing cellular source material consented for research, clinical and commercial use. To support the development of Garuda’s approach, NMDP BioTherapies will: 

 

  • Provide bioinformatics consulting designed to aid in determining the best coverage for Garuda’s approach. 
  • Source difficult-to-find donors with very specific donor requirements.  
  • Provide regulatory support to ensure donor consent and that sourced materials are compliant with health regulatory agencies worldwide. 
  • Facilitate Garuda’s collection protocol and post-collection processing needs. 
  • Support supply chain logistics to ensure that valuable starting material gets to Garuda in a predictable and timely manner. 

 

Like bone marrow transplants, Garuda’s technology has the potential to address, and possibly cure, more than 120 diseases for a diverse population of patients with unmet medical need. This collaboration with NMDP BioTherapies will further Garuda’s platform for generation of off-the-shelf, self-renewing blood stem cells towards the clinic as potential treatment for patients with hematological diseases. The collaboration will also advance Garuda’s continued development of HLA-matched HSCs, with the goal of greatly broadening the eligibility of patients and increasing access to blood and other cellular therapies in regenerative medicine. 

About NMDP BioTherapies
 

NMDP BioTherapies is the only cell and gene therapy solutions provider with customizable services to support the end-to-end cell therapy supply chain. Backed by the industry-leading experience of NMDP℠ and a research partnership with the CIBMTR® (Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research®), the organization designs solutions that advance the development of cell and gene therapies across the globe. 

 

NMDP BioTherapies is dedicated to accelerating patient access to life-saving cell and gene therapies by providing high-quality cellular source material from the NMDP Registry℠, the world’s most diverse registry of more than 7 million potential blood stem cell donors. Through established relationships with apheresis, marrow collection, and transplant centers worldwide, the organization develops, onboards, trains, and manages expansive collection networks to advance cell therapies. NMDP BioTherapies uses a proven infrastructure consisting of regulatory compliance and managed logistics experts and cell therapy supply chain case managers to successfully transport and deliver regulatory-compliant life-saving therapies across the globe. Through the CIBMTR, NMDP extends services beyond the cell therapy supply chain to include long-term follow-up tracking for FDA-approved CAR-T therapies. 

 

For more information, follow NMDP BioTherapies on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

 

About Garuda 

Garuda Therapeutics seeks to create a world that eliminates the dependency on donor or patient cells for blood stem cell transplants. Our platform technology for generating off-the-shelf, self-renewing blood stem cells is poised to provide patients with rapid and broad access to consistent, durable, HLA-compatible and transgene-free blood stem cell therapies. Like bone marrow transplants, our technology could provide potentially curative therapies for more than 120 diseases. https://garudatx.com/ 

Media Contacts:  

Bonnie Quintanilla, bonnie@clarityqst.com  

Phyllis Grabot, phyllis@clarityqst.com  

(877) 887-7611