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Sartorius used an Innovation Spotlight at the Cell & Gene Meeting on the Mesa in Phoenix on Tuesday, October 6, 2026 to set out the cost and labor case for its Eveo Cell Therapy Platform, with chief technology officer Oscar-Werner Reif saying the company believes the automated system can bring costs below $40,000 per patient.
One operator, eight patients
Sartorius announced Eveo in March as a closed, automated system for making autologous cell therapies, in which each patient’s cells are processed as a separate batch. Reif said the system gives each patient a reactor and combines “eight patients in a small footprint”.
Compared with the classical setup, he said, “by nature, your CAPEX is much lower”.
“One operator can now run in that system eight patients,” he said, adding that this “leads to a minimum savings of more than a million per unit”.
Perfusion and cell expansion
Reif said the system includes “proprietary perfusion technology” in its bioreactor, and linked faster expansion to a shorter time and a faster return to the patient.
He said that in real cases the system achieves “a 70% increase in production efficiency due to the perfusion system”. Early users of the system, he said, had calculated how much it could reduce their own costs.
On costs, he said that “we believe, based on our calculations, we can reduce to less than 40,000 per patient”. Sartorius’s product page lists a cost of goods of under $40,000 per autologous CAR-T batch and a reduction of more than 50% in capital and operating expenditure.
Scaling by adding systems
Reif said expanding a conventional process requires “a multitude of systems”, while an Eveo user can “just stay in the standard suite”.
“You don’t have to scale a process,” he said, calling scale-up “a very straightforward simple thing”.
He also said the same system can be used for process development and for GMP work, that it can run tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), and that different cell separation technologies can be applied depending on cell type. He said everything for the system comes prefilled, which removes labor around logistics.
He closed by saying Sartorius has “a whole range of products covering all the critical raw materials”.
About Sartorius
Sartorius is a Göttingen, Germany-based supplier to the biopharmaceutical research and manufacturing industries, organized into Bioprocess Solutions and Lab Products & Services divisions. The company says it generated sales revenue of around €3.5 billion in 2025 and has more than 14,000 employees.
Sartorius announced the Eveo Cell Therapy Platform on March 16, 2026, saying it integrates cell selection, activation, gene modification, expansion, wash and concentration, and final formulation in a closed system. The company said it had tested the platform with partners including ElevateBio, a cell therapy contract manufacturer, and that in a pilot the system performed in line with design expectations, and that a single operator can process eight patient batches in cleanroom space traditionally needed for two. Sartorius said financial modeling showed the platform could cut manufacturing costs by around 90%. It planned to take orders from September 2026, with first deliveries expected in 2027.
Onyx has also reported from this week’s meeting on the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, the FDA’s CBER director, Arbor Biotechnologies and Rocket Pharmaceuticals.
Sources: Sartorius Innovation Spotlight, Cell & Gene Meeting on the Mesa, October 6, 2026; Meeting on the Mesa agenda and Innovation Spotlights listing; Sartorius press release (March 16, 2026); Sartorius Eveo Cell Therapy Platform product page
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