Contact
If you need media that scales, we'd like to help. Get in touch with us using the form below.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
If you need media that scales, we'd like to help. Get in touch with us using the form below.
Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) are pushing the boundaries of modern medicine. Examples such as CAR T therapies, stem cell treatments, and viral vector delivery systems are opening new doors for how we treat disease. But turning that potential into reality at scale is no easy task.
Much of the spotlight has focused on automation, new facilities, and downstream processes, but a critical upstream process often holds back progress: growth media.
Unlike traditional small-molecule drugs, ATMPs rely on living cells and viruses that are extremely sensitive to their environment. Their behaviour, yield, and safety profile are directly shaped by the composition of the media in which they grow.
Yet many media formulations used today originated in academic settings and haven’t been optimised for the unique demands of ATMP commercialisation. They often include undefined or animal-derived components, vary from batch to batch, and don’t always support newer or more complex cell types. The result? Costly optimisation cycles, inconsistent quality, and limited scalability which leads to longer wait times for patients who urgently need access to life-changing therapies.
Media is a critical process input that influences:
• Cell phenotype and behaviour, including proliferation and differentiation
• Vector production efficiency, such as AAV and lentiviral yields
• Critical quality attributes (CQAs), which regulators scrutinise closely
• Reproducibility, especially in autologous or small-batch settings
As regulators tighten standards around consistency and safety, and as biopharma pushes to reduce costs, it’s increasingly clear that next-gen therapies need next-gen inputs.
There is no one-size-fits-all media. Each cell type has unique needs, and what works for mAbs won’t suit lentiviral production. Even small modifications can impact scale-up, stability, or potency.
Media optimised for CHO-based mAb production might prioritise high titer and cost-efficiency. In contrast, stem cells will require media that preserves pluripotency or drives controlled differentiation, with strict control over cytokines, growth factors, and shear stress.
Even within a single media development campaign, small changes in nutrient composition can drastically affect critical quality attributes (CQAs), downstream scalability, or therapeutic potency. That’s why media development in ATMPs isn’t about hitting a single metric - it’s about navigating multiple objectives at once.
Innovation in ATMPs has progressed quickly, but the supporting inputs haven’t always kept pace. This has created friction as therapies transition from small-batch experiments to clinical and commercial production.
ATMP developers work with sensitive systems, non-standard processes, and high expectations for quality. Using media designed for other applications often leads to variability, scale-up issues, and regulatory risk.
Media development is often seen as tweaking existing formulas, but many ATMPs need a clean-slate approach. At Multus, we design media de novo - tailored to each cell line and performance goal. This allows for greater flexibility and control, especially for teams working with newer or less-characterised systems.
As ATMPs become more complex and regulated, there’s a growing need to rethink the tools used to produce them. Media is one of the most fundamental (and often overlooked) pieces of that puzzle.
At Multus, we’ve built a platform that tackles the challenges faced by ATMP manufacturers. Our technology combines biology, automation, and artificial intelligence to design animal-free, scalable media tailored to specific cell types and processes.
We don’t simply optimise existing media, we design it from scratch. Our platform moves beyond slow design of experiments (DoE) methods to explore a wider range of conditions and find high-performing formulations faster.
Using a combination of high-throughput screening, multi-objective optimisation, and predictive modelling, we can explore up to 4,800 conditions at once, delivering optimal formulations to customers in a fraction of the time it takes to develop traditional media.
We’re actively exploring media development in areas of ATMP manufacturing, including:
• CHO cells for monoclonal antibody (mAb) production
• HEK cells for AAV and lentiviral vector manufacture
• Jurkat cells as a model for T cell-based therapies like CAR T
• Stem cells for regenerative medicine and tissue engineering
As we’ve expanded into the biopharma industry, it’s become clear that many of the same media formulation challenges we see in other fields of biotechnology are equally common in advanced therapies.
If you’re developing ATMPs and want to improve performance, reproducibility, or cost, we’d love to talk. Get in touch to learn how our high-performance media can drive your project forward.
Sign up for email updates:
