Cellares Appoints Former Kite Global Ops Leader, Christopher McDonald, to Board of Advisors

September 22, 2025 at 09:00 AM EDT

Veteran operations leader, with experience at Amgen, Novartis, AstraZeneca, and Kite/Gilead brings decades of manufacturing, quality, and supply chain expertise to support Cellares’ global IDMO Smart Factory expansion

Cellares, the world’s first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO), today announced the appointment of Chris McDonald to its Advisory Board. McDonald most recently served as Senior Vice President and Global Head of Technical Operations (Tech Ops) at Kite, a Gilead Company, where he oversaw Global Manufacturing, Global Quality, Process Development, and Global Supply Chain across six worldwide sites and more than 3,000 employees. His organization supported viral vector, clinical, and commercial cell therapy operations and played a key role in establishing new manufacturing facilities, scaling capacity, and ensuring cGMP compliance.

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Pictured: Chris McDonald, newest member of Cellares' Board of Advisors

Earlier in his 35-year career, McDonald held leadership roles at Amgen, Novartis, and AstraZeneca. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Nucleus RadioPharma and has previously served on the board of Fosun Kite in Shanghai.

“Chris has scaled one of the industry’s largest commercial cell therapy operations,” said Fabian Gerlinghaus, co-founder and CEO of Cellares. “That experience is directly relevant as Cellares expands operations across the United States, Europe, and Japan and continues building an integrated manufacturing and quality control infrastructure that biopharma partners can trust at global scale.”

“Cellares’ technology allows biotechs and pharmas to scale manufacturing without having to increase or decrease staffing by thousands of employees in response to demand variability, while providing the potential of the lowest cost of cell therapy manufacturing in the industry," said McDonald.

Cellares’ IDMO platform combines the company’s proprietary Cell Shuttle™ (end-to-end automated cell therapy manufacturing) and Cell Q™ (high-throughput automated quality control) with a rapidly expanding global network of IDMO Smart Factories. This model delivers greater scalability at significantly lower cost than conventional CDMOs, enabling cell therapy developers of all sizes to bring life-saving therapies to patients faster, more reliably, and at global scale.

About Cellares

Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) and takes an Industry 4.0 approach to mass manufacturing the living drugs of the 21st century. The company is developing and operating integrated technologies for cell therapy manufacturing to accelerate access to life-saving cell therapies. The company’s Cell Shuttle™ integrates all the technologies required for the entire manufacturing process in a flexible and high-throughput platform that delivers end-to-end automation. While the Cell Shuttle automates cell therapy manufacturing, the Cell Q™ automates quality control at high throughput, both for in-process and release QC. Cell Shuttles™ and Cell Qs™ will be deployed in Cellares’ Smart Factories around the world, enabling each Smart Factory to produce 10 times as many cell therapy batches as a conventional CDMO with the same facility size and headcount. Partnering with Cellares enables academic medical centers, biotechnology companies, and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate cell therapy development and scale out manufacturing, lower process failure rates, lower manufacturing costs, and meet global patient demand.

The company is headquartered in South San Francisco, California with its first commercial-scale IDMO Smart Factory in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Cellares is building a global network of IDMO Smart Factories, with additional facilities under construction in Europe and Japan. The company is backed by world-class investors and has raised over $355 million in financing.

For more information about Cellares, please visit cellares.com.