Going to market

Keith Thompson

The Technology Strategy Board’s Catapult centres aim to help academics translate their research into products and services. Adam Smith met Keith Thompson, chief executive of the Cell Therapy Catapult, to find out what this means in practice.

There’s lots of buzz around Catapults, but what will the Cell Therapy Catapult actually do?

Most academic projects in this area are lab based, so they haven’t really addressed scaling-up issues to make large amounts of cells reliably. We can give researchers advice or do collaborative projects with them, and we can also take on projects ourselves. Some of it’s a desktop job and some is physically taking the cells in, growing them and putting together a package of hi-tech processes so that when they go into manufacturing, they will work. Our objective will be to transfer worked-out processes to contract manufacturing so products can be made.