Thirty-five AutoCRAT consortium members met online for a 2-day plenary meeting September 11th and 14th. The agenda was packed and lively, fruitful discussions ensued after each work package presentation. For some of the participants, this was their first chance to meet the team.
Presentations and discussions revolved around: a review of budgets, deliverables, milestones, the Scientific Advisory Board composition, a review and update of project risks, new external developments, gender equality, the discovery and validation of state-of-the-art osteoarthritis regenerative cell therapeutics, cell-free extracellular vesicle (EV)-based therapeutic development for modulation of osteoarthritis, the GMP-compliant, scalable, automated and adaptive AutoCRAT production processes, automation for at-line testing, automation for production of AutoCRAT cells and exosomes, the translation of AutoCRAT therapeutics for osteoarthritis, regulatory compliance and economic evaluation of the AutoCRAT production and testing platforms, Communication, Dissemination & Exploitation, including the project website, press releases, intellectual property management, the publications policy, and Ethics and the associated outstanding deliverables.
There is a lot of work to be done, and progress has been hampered slightly by COVID-19 delays, but there was an impressive amount of preliminary data presented which led to questions and responses from the team and a collegial plan to move the project forward.
Online AutoCRAT plenary meeting photo, September 14, 2020
