Britain’s largest pharmaceutical company, Glaxo SmithKline (GSK), has formed a strategic collaboration with German biotechnology firm Miltenyi Biotec to develop cell and gene therapy-based treatments.

Financial terms of the deal were not revealed.

GSK is building a cell and gene therapy R&D platform to underpin development of novel therapies in oncology and rare diseases – two of its core research areas. Cell and gene therapies focus on genetically engineering living cells to either repair the direct cause of a genetic defect or equip them with genes that enhance their functions.

Miltenyi Biotec will integrate greater automation and leading-edge processing technology into GSK’s current manufacturing capabilities. The goal is for the increased automation to further industrialize cell and gene therapy, overcoming the manufacturing and scale-up constraints that are associated with current, more manual processes.

According to GSK, this could reduce the costs and geographical barriers associated with the treatment, speed up development of therapies and support their potential beyond rare diseases and limited populations.

The partnership will also combine both companies’ technology and expertise to advance the discovery of new chimeric antigen-receptor (CAR) T-cell based therapeutics. These are engineered to strengthen a patient’s natural T-cell response in order to target and destroy cancer cells. GSK and Miltenyi Biotec will work together on defined CAR-T oncology targets and on developing technology advancements in this field.

Patrick Vallance, GSK’s president of pharmaceuticals R&D, explained that, as living treatments, cell-based gene therapies are unique to individual patients, complex to produce, and current manufacturing processes limit their use to local treatment of small patient populations. “With Miltenyi Biotec, our vision is to transform current technology so that we can expand the possibilities for cell and gene therapy treatment to wider patient populations with broader geographical reach,” he said.