SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 23, 2025 — 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.
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.