News & Articles
Discover our latest news features, insightful blog posts, and important updates from AuctuCel.
AuctuCel and CELLAAX Ink MoU to Advance Cell Therapy Innovation with Next-Generation Culture Media
AuctuCel Pte Ltd, a spinoff from A*STAR’s Bioprocessing Technology Institute, and CELLAAX Sdn Bhd, a biopharmaceutical company pioneering stem cell and immunotherapy solutions, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to jointly advance the development and manufacturing of cutting-edge cell therapies. The MoU, signed on 26th June 2025 in Singapore, formalizes a collaboration that leverages AuctuCel’s proprietary media optimization technology and CELLAAX’s therapeutic expertise to improve the quality, consistency, and scalability of advanced cell-based treatments. “This collaboration brings together CELLAAX’s deep therapeutic know-how and AuctuCel’s AI-powered media innovation,” said Dr Fhu Chee Wai, Co-founder and CEO of AuctuCel. “Together, we’re setting a new standard for precision-engineered media that supports not just cell growth, but translational success.” Under the MoU, AuctuCel and CELLAAX will explore joint initiatives aimed at enhancing media development and application for cell therapy manufacturing. This includes the supply of ready-to-use and customized cell culture media, collaborative efforts in optimizing formulations for specific cell types, and joint research activities to evaluate performance and support process development. The partnership also opens pathways for future co-development of novel solutions and technologies, with the shared goal of accelerating the clinical and commercial readiness of advanced therapies.
Optimizing Culture Media Using Small Datasets via New Computer Model
As featured in A*STAR newsroom and Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News. A new spinoff company is about to launch a computer model that aims to accelerate process development by speeding up the optimization of cell culture media. AuctuCel, which plans to open for business on June 1, will offer a mechanistic model that requires less client data to work than those based on artificial intelligence (AI), according to Zach Pang, PhD, group leader at the A*STAR Bioprocessing Technology Institute in Singapore. Pang, who helped develop the model and introduced it at Bioprocessing Summit Europe in March, said, “Our key message is that you no longer have to perform laborious, time-consuming, manual optimization for culture media. Our new computational approach gives you an option that’s much faster and cheaper, helping accelerate your entire development timeline.” Pang explained that the team’s deep knowledge of culture media helped them to develop a mechanistic model, which doesn’t require large training datasets to work. “It doesn’t merely rely on correlation or a statistical method,” he added. “The person who runs our model is a hard-core biologist who’s taken up mechanistic modeling as, for any mechanistical model, you need to know what’s going on.”