Quintessence Biotech is reinventing the bio-separation process with a biological reagent capable of reproducing natural processes while simplifying industrial workflows. The company’s technology improves therapeutic efficacy, reduces manufacturing costs while working with existing cell culture hardware, Quintessence said.
Cell therapies are based on the idea of using living cells as medicine instead of treating diseases with chemical molecules. These therapies reactivate the body’s natural defenses to fight cancers and pathogens or restore tissue. With over 4,000 cell and gene therapy drugs currently in development worldwide, the field is rapidly expanding beyond blood cancers into solid tumors, autoimmune diseases and regenerative medicine.
Bio-separation sits at the core of the manufacturing process for these medicines, effectively determining their cost, performance and scalability. The current standard relies heavily on magnetic bead-based technologies, a market dominated by a handful of suppliers, including Miltenyi Biotec. Developers and researchers have broadly acknowledged that existing methods are difficult to scale and expensive to run. A CAR-T therapy can cost upwards of $700,000 per patient in part due to manufacturing complexity. Relapse rates after CAR-T treatment for certain blood cancers remain significant, with some studies reporting rates 30% to 60%, though causes are multifactorial and debated in the literature. Quintessence argues that the activation step using current magnetic particle methods produces cells that are less clinically effective — a claim the company says its early data supports, but which has not yet been validated in peer-reviewed studies.
Credit: Quintessence Biotech
“You can’t manufacture biology with mechanical and chemical procedures and processes. You need to adapt the tool to the complexity and the beauty of biology,” said Charles Cavaniol, co-founder and CEO of Quintessence Biotech.
A new bio-separation process reduces cost, improves efficacy and versatility
Quintessence is replacing legacy magnetic beads with a biomimetic reagent, allowing for simplified cell separation and induced physiological activation that integrates into existing cell culture systems. The innovation requires fewer manual steps, reduced equipment dependency, shorter timelines and elimination of early hardware lock-in, Quintessence said.
The core problem with magnetic bead activation is that it is inherently mechanical: a rigid particle latches onto a T cell’s surface receptor and cross-links it in an uncontrolled way, producing a strong but physiologically abnormal activation signal that can exhaust cells or skew them toward less effective phenotypes. DACS instead presents antigens through a flexible lipid surface that deforms and interacts with T cells the way a natural antigen-presenting cell would — generating a controlled signal that steers cells toward the therapeutic phenotypes needed for durable clinical responses.
“For cell therapy developers, this is a massive breakthrough — you have a simple process that you can use in a manual lab scale, and that can transition without friction at an industrial scale,” Cavaniol said.
The company has two customer-validated products supporting 2027 clinical trial therapies, which could represent 20,000 patients. The company is currently delivering 100 monthly kits with products meeting sterility and traceability requirements toward GMP compliance.
An artificial cell inspired by nature
The company’s proprietary innovation, DACS, is based on a buoyant biomimetic lipid particle technology, derived from the work of Jacques Fattaccioli, an associate professor at Université PSL. The lipid emulsion reproduces the essential properties of a human cell: size, flexibility and molecular interactions.
“It’s like a balloon. You target the cells and then, thanks to gravity, they separate themselves. That very simple process allows the bio-separation process to work at any scale and in any cell culture hardware,” Cavaniol said.
The technology combines flotation-based bioseparation and artificial antigen-presenting cell (aAPC) characteristics. Flotation-based bioseparation enables manufacturing simplicity, reducing the number of steps and dependency on specialized equipment. aAPC characteristics allow physiological and controlled activation of therapeutic cells, recreating an environment close to natural biology.
“With current manufacturing processes and magnetic particles, you only have up to 45% of clinically relevant cells because of this mechanical behavior. By reproducing natural processes with our artificial antigen-presenting cells, we are able to have up to 85% clinically relevant T cells,” Cavaniol said.
