Cell and Gene Therapy Conference 2026
Engineering Consistency. Scaling Innovation. Advancing Cell & Gene Therapies.
Day One: 8th December 2026, London, United Kingdom
CELL SOURCING, ISOLATION & CONSISTENCY
09:00 Moderator Opening Remarks
09:10 From Donor to Dose: Tackling Variability at the Starting-Cell Stage
The quality and consistency of a cell therapy product are fundamentally influenced by the starting material. Donor-to-donor, tissue-to-tissue, and run-to-run variability can affect cell phenotype, viability, potency, and differentiation potential. This talk will delve into practical strategies for sourcing, isolating, and characterising starting cells to establish greater consistency and improve downstream manufacturing performance.
09:27 Question and Answer
09:30 Getting the Starting Material Right: Cell Sourcing, Isolation & Characterisation
A robust cell therapy process starts with well-defined, reproducible starting material. This session will examine how sourcing decisions, isolation methods, and early-stage cell characterisation can influence product quality. It will highlight approaches to control variability in cell phenotype, viability, potency, and differentiation state before cells enter the manufacturing process.
09:47 Question and Answer
09:50 Controlling Cell-to-Cell Variability: Building Consistency into Cell Therapy Manufacturing
Cell variability remains one of the major challenges in developing scalable and reproducible cell therapies. Differences between donors, tissues, and manufacturing runs can translate into significant changes in product performance. This talk will discuss strategies for identifying, monitoring, and controlling variability from cell sourcing and isolation through to downstream manufacturing.
09:47 Question and Answer
10:10 The Starting Cell Matters: How Source and Isolation Impact Cell Therapy Quality
This presentation will explore how understanding and controlling starting-cell attributes can help create more predictable and consistent cell therapy products.
10:27 Question and Answer
10:30 From Biological Variability to Manufacturing Control: Standardising Starting Cells
Biological variability cannot always be eliminated, but it can be measured, understood, and managed. This talk will examine how cell sourcing and isolation strategies can be combined with critical quality attribute assessment to establish more consistent starting populations. The focus will be on translating biological variability into measurable manufacturing controls and more robust cell therapy processes.
10:55 Question and Answer
11:00 Networking Tea Break To Connect With Peers, Exchange Insights, And Explore Shared Interests.
CELL EXPANSION & MANUFACTURING SCALE-UP
11:30 Scaling Living Products: Rethinking Cell Expansion for Manufacturing
Scaling cell therapies is fundamentally different from scaling conventional biologics. This talk will explore the unique challenges of expanding living cells while maintaining growth kinetics, phenotype, viability, and functional potency—and how manufacturing strategies must evolve to address these challenges.
11:47 Question and Answer
11:50 From Flask to Factory: The Challenges of Scaling Cell Expansion
Moving from small-scale culture to commercial manufacturing introduces changes in process conditions, cell density, oxygen transfer, nutrient availability, shear, and process control. This talk will examine the critical scale-up challenges and practical approaches for translating robust cell expansion processes from laboratory to manufacturing scale.
12:07 Question and Answer
12:10 Bigger Isn’t Better: Maintaining Cell Quality at Manufacturing Scale
This talk will discuss how to design scale-up strategies that preserve critical quality attributes while increasing manufacturing capacity.
12:27 Question and Answer
12:30 Scaling Without Compromise: Engineering Robust Cell Expansion Processes
A successful cell expansion process must deliver both quantity and quality. This presentation will focus on process engineering approaches to achieve reproducible cell growth at larger scales, including control of the cellular environment, process parameters, and scale-dependent risks that can impact product performance.
12:55 Question and Answer
13:00 Lunch Break
14:00 The Biology of Scale: Why Cell Expansion Behaves Differently at Manufacturing Scale
Cells respond to their environment, and that environment changes significantly as processes become larger. This talk will explore the biological and engineering principles underlying scale-dependent changes in cell growth, phenotype, viability, and function, and how understanding these interactions can enable more predictable manufacturing scale-up.
14:17 Question and Answer
14:20 From Cell Growth to Cell Manufacturing: Building Scalable Expansion Platforms
The transition from experimental cell culture to a scalable manufacturing platform requires more than increasing reactor size. This talk will examine how to build cell expansion processes that are scalable, reproducible, and capable of consistently delivering cells with the required identity, quality, viability, and function.
14:37 Question and Answer
14:40 Beyond Cell Count: Maintaining Quality and Potency from Manufacturing to Clinic
Cell therapies are defined by what cells can do—not simply by how many cells are delivered. This talk will explore how exhaustion, differentiation, senescence, and functional decline can emerge during manufacturing and storage, and how these changes can undermine potency assays and ultimately clinical performance. We will discuss strategies to monitor and preserve critical cellular attributes throughout the product lifecycle.
14:57 Question and Answer
15:00 Networking Tea Break To Connect With Peers, Exchange Insights, And Explore Shared Interests.
15:30 Protecting Cellular Fitness: The Missing Link in Cell Therapy Manufacturing
Maintaining viable cells is not the same as maintaining functional cells. Manufacturing and storage conditions can progressively alter cellular fitness, creating challenges for potency testing and increasing uncertainty around clinical performance. This presentation will explore key drivers of cellular deterioration and strategies to preserve functional quality from process development through final product storage.
15:47 Question and Answer
15:50 Potent on Paper, Functional in Practice: Ensuring Cell Quality Across the Product Lifecycle
Cell therapy potency is influenced by a dynamic combination of phenotype, metabolic state, differentiation, exhaustion, and functional capacity. This talk will address why conventional release measurements may not fully predict therapeutic activity and how potency assays can evolve to better capture clinically relevant cell function. The focus will be on connecting manufacturing controls, cell quality, and meaningful measures of biological activity.
16:10 Question and Answer
16:20 Keeping Cells Fit for Purpose: Managing Quality, Function, and Potency
Cellular products can change substantially between manufacturing and administration, even when conventional quality attributes remain within specification.
16:50 Question and Answer
17:00 End of day One