GuangzhouJune 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — On June 23, 2026, Yunzhou Bio and MaxCyte, a renowned cell engineering technology supplier, announced a strategic partnership. The collaboration will focus on Yunzhou Bio’s proprietary MiniVec™ plasmid system and MaxCyte’s industry-leading clinical-grade electroporation platform to jointly develop a next-generation ex vivo gene delivery platform, providing more efficient and safer solutions for cell therapy research, development, and production.
Key Challenges Facing Cell Therapy Commercialization
In recent years, ex vivo cell therapies such as CAR-T, CAR-NK, and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have developed rapidly, but bottlenecks in safety, production costs, and large-scale manufacturing capabilities still hinder their further advancement and application.
Particularly in the delivery phase, existing technical approaches each have their limitations. Traditional DNA or RNA electroporation delivery often results in low cell viability and poor therapeutic durability; the more widely used lentiviral vectors face issues such as high production costs and complex processes, along with potential safety risks from vector integration into the host genome. Against this backdrop, the industry urgently needs a more efficient, safer, and scalable technical pathway.
Building a Next-Generation Electroporation Delivery Platform
This partnership is precisely driven by this industry need. The two parties will deeply integrate Yunzhou Bio’s MiniVecTM plasmid system with MaxCyte’s Flow Electroporation® technology to jointly create a next-generation electroporation ex vivo gene delivery platform.
Yunzhou Bio’s MiniVec™ is a miniaturized plasmid backbone that eliminates the need for antibiotics or other additives for clone selection, effectively streamlining the transition to GMP-grade production. It has been validated across multiple application scenarios to deliver superior yield and performance. MaxCyte’s Flow Electroporation® employs a gentle continuous-flow electroporation process that effectively reduces cellular stress responses, preserves cell viability and function, while achieving efficient, stable, and easily scalable gene delivery.
The combination of MiniVec™ and Flow Electroporation® leverages the technical strengths of both parties, promising to overcome the traditional trade-off between cell viability and delivery efficiency, opening new possibilities for cell engineering development.
Balancing Efficiency, Viability, and Scalability
Preliminary data from CAR-T production shows that, compared to traditional platforms, the new platform developed through this collaboration can increase cell survival rates by 2.4 times and gene expression levels by 1.4 times. Both MiniVec™ and Flow Electroporation® are compatible with various payload forms, including DNA, RNA, and RNP, and have been validated in multiple application scenarios such as CRISPR gene editing, transposon-mediated cell engineering, and transient protein expression, demonstrating strong application potential. Additionally, both technologies have been proven scalable from the research stage to clinical production.
By integrating the technical advantages of both parties, the new platform, with its more efficient and stable cell engineering capabilities, is expected to provide a more reliable, safe, and flexible solution for ex vivo gene delivery in therapeutic fields, further advancing the development and commercialization of cell therapy products.
Maher Masoud, President and CEO of MaxCyte, stated: “For cell therapies to realize their true clinical value, they require not only outstanding therapeutic effects but also manufacturability, scalability, and commercial viability. By combining MaxCyte’s Flow Electroporation® with Yunzhou Bio’s MiniVec™ platform, we are confident in establishing a new standard for non-viral delivery, further enhancing cell quality and production efficiency, and creating a more efficient pathway for developers from research to commercialization.”
Dr. Lan Tian, Founder and Chief Scientist of Yunzhou Bio, stated: “This partnership fully leverages the technical strengths of both parties in the field of cell engineering. We aim to jointly create a next-generation electroporation platform for innovative therapies like CAR-T, delivering higher performance while offering greater safety, scalability, and cost advantages. Both companies have deep expertise in GMP-compliant clinical development, which helps build a complete development system covering clinical research to commercial production. We look forward to helping drug developers reduce the difficulty of large-scale production, optimize commercialization pathways, and provide stronger support for financing and market promotion.”
Leveraging more efficient and reliable cell engineering capabilities, the new platform will provide a more robust, flexible, and safe solution for therapeutic ex vivo gene delivery. In the future, Yunzhou Bio and MaxCyte will continue to drive the application and translation of this platform, offering stronger technical support for the development of next-generation cell therapies, and enabling more innovative therapies to reach the clinic and benefit more patients.