City of Hope and Cellares signed an agreement to evaluate Cellares’ automated Cell Shuttle manufacturing and Cell Q QC platform for City of Hope’s CAR T program targeting glioblastoma. The collaboration will test automation-driven processes early to standardize manufacturing workflows and analytics for a challenging solid tumor CAR T candidate, aiming to accelerate clinical translation and scale. Separately, Aragen Biologics launched CHOMax, a CHO cell‑line development and early manufacturing platform that promises DNA‑to‑IND timelines measured in months. The platform integrates cell line development, analytics, and GMP manufacturing pathways, targeting faster antibody and IgG program advancement. Together these moves reflect a dual industry push: automation to reduce variability and bottlenecks in cell therapy manufacturing, and CDMO platformization to compress timelines for biologics CMC. Both developments address long-standing scale and reproducibility constraints that limit rapid commercialization of advanced therapies.