// Sep 2026
What Drives Cell Therapy Manufacturing Costs, and How Do You Lower Them?
The biggest drivers of cell therapy cost of goods (COGs) are decisions made during process development, not manufacturing execution. Media consumption, manual touchpoints, facility throughput, and analytical testing burden are all downstream consequences of upstream design choices. Reducing COGS at scale without introducing quality risk means getting those early decisions right, not optimizing around them later.
The Process Design Decisions That Lock In Cost
Programs do not set out to build expensive processes. They build processes optimized for speed at discovery stage with high media volumes, manual interventions, custom analytic panels, and then carry those designs forward into clinical manufacturing. By the time anyone models the cost per dose, the process is fixed.
The decisions with the largest COGS impact are often made in the first months of process development: choice of activation method, media formulation and feeding strategy, expansion platform, and harvest timing. Each of these determines how much labor, material, and cleanroom time a single batch requires. A process designed around manual sampling and open manipulations does not become closed and automated as the program advances. It becomes expensive.
Labor and Facility Time Are the Levers Most Programs Underestimate
When reviewing program costs, raw materials get the attention, but it is the number of manual steps per batch and the days each batch occupies a suite that determine whether a process can scale economically. In autologous cell therapy, labor and facility occupancy typically account for 50β70% of COGS. A process that requires twelve operator interventions over nine days in a cleanroom has a fundamentally different cost structure than one designed for six interventions over six days, even if the cell product is equivalent.
Programs that address this early do three things: design for closed processing, reduce in-process sampling, and select expansion platforms that shorten culture duration and/or employ automation. That discipline builds cost efficiency into the process rather than trying to engineer it in after clinical data is generated.
ElevateBio Is Building Toward Manufacturing Efficiency as a Design Principle
At ElevateBio, the investment in manufacturing technology and platform architecture is oriented around this problem. Process development, MSAT and manufacturing operate as a connected system, so that decisions about cost, throughput, and quality are made together rather than sequentially. The goal is not to optimize a process after it is built. It is to design processes where efficiency is structural β where closed systems, shortened culture durations, and streamlined analytics are built in from the start, not retrofitted under commercial pressure.
The Programs That Reduce COGS Are the Ones That Design for It
Cost reduction in cell therapy is not a manufacturing problem. It is a process development problem. The programs that reach commercial scale with viable unit economics are the ones that treated COGS as a design constraint from day one, not the ones that built a process first and asked what it costs later. The earlier manufacturing economics enter the conversation, the more room there is to act on them.
Chris Shumway, M.S.
Senior Director, Manufacturing
Chris Shumway joined ElevateBio in 2024 as Senior Director of Manufacturing, where he oversees manufacturing processes at ElevateBio BaseCamp, ensuring efficiency, compliance, and high-quality production. He has more than 20 years of experience in process development, validation, quality systems, and driving continuous improvement in manufacturing operations.
Prior to his role at ElevateBio, Chris held multiple manufacturing and leadership positions at Avid Bioservices, NantKwest, and AbbVie. He received his M.S. in Engineering Management from Syracuse University and his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Lafayette College.
