Lying at the northeastern tip of Lake Erie and just south of Lake Ontario, more than multiple feet of lake-effect snow comes to Buffalo, NY. It will soon be home to the GMP Engineering & Cell Manufacturing Facility (GEM) at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

A couple of decades ago, few scientists expected much success from cell therapies. “Now, I think everybody’s a believer,” says Yeong “Christopher” Choi, PhD, GEM’s senior vice president of industry partnerships and technical director of GMP.

Although cell therapies could help patients with cancer and other diseases, such as autoimmune ones, manufacturing remains challenging. The process depends on highly trained experts applying advanced technology. GEM, planned to open in the first quarter of 2025, will combine those ingredients.

GEM will include 20 manufacturing rooms, which Choi believes will make Roswell Park’s GMP facility the largest based at an academic center. Plus, GEM’s experienced team strongly believes it will be able to take an idea from concept and preclinical research through clinical testing and regulatory approval of a new therapy.

“I think having that experience here, including a lot of industry experience, can really be beneficial to a customer—from an academic to a start-up—who has an idea,” Choi says.

With an idea in hand, GEM’s structure will boost the development of a new therapy, according to Choi. With all of the needed experts in “offices right next to each other,” Choi explains, “we can just go right next door and knock,” to check on timelines, preclinical results, or any other aspect of a project.

In addition, the broader Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center team will support GEM. “If you had some issues with gene editing or if you had some issues with sequencing, we have core facilities located right here at Roswell, where we have world experts that we can actually tap,” Choi says.

Creating such a strong community between GEM, scientists and clinicians at the cancer center, and customers, Choi says, is “a really unique way and a really valuable way to get your ideas translated into humans and help develop and find a cure for cancer.”

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