Manufacturing

At Sonoma Bio, we control the process from research through doing our own manufacturing.

Our approach is based on balancing expertise in research, development, manufacturing, and clinical care. Effective manufacturing is critical to being able to create and deliver treatments. We are building our own manufacturing facility in Seattle so we can engage the right talent with a wide range of expertise in cell therapy development. Our business is making Treg cells do what we want them to do. Being in control of the process is important.

Engineering regulatory T cells

The first step is engineering the Treg. The Sonoma process starts with endogenous, thymic-derived Treg, rather than manipulating another cell type to become a Treg. The engineered Treg then has enhanced function and the ability to target specific tissues.

Growing regulatory T cells

The second step is getting that engineered Treg to propagate. Growing Tregs is difficult. It took one of our founders, Jeff Bluestone, 12 years to develop a process that would enable us to do this effectively.

Sonoma’s proprietary cell isolation and expansion process results in Treg cells that are stable and durable, without the need for additional modifications such as overexpression of FOXP3.

Our own manufacturing

Controlling our manufacturing has many advantages. We have the freedom to try new approaches and techniques, innovate, and improve.

In many ways, the manufacturing process IS the product. Without effective manufacturing we could not deliver on the promise of the science as we could not achieve scale.

We are applying our platform to several initial programs.