Richard Grant

Richard is a product development engineer and Program Manager with 20 years of experience in the Cell and Gene Therapy field both as a consultant and working in-house on product and process development.

In his consulting role at Invetech Richard worked as a Program Manager, then moved to San Diego as VP and Operations Manager (2007-2011) to establish Invetech’s San Diego design house, before returning to Australia to become Invetech’s Global VP of Cell Therapy. At Invetech Richard ran, consulted on or supervised projects for clients including Adaptimmune, Argos Therapeutics, Vericel, BetaLogix, bluebird bio, CCRM, Celyad, DiscGenics, EryTech, Humacyte, Janssen, KBI Biopharma (kSep), Innovacell, Organovo, ThermoFisher and Viacyte. In general, these projects involved the specification, design, build, commissioning, testing and V+V of manufacturing systems (equipment and disposables) for both autologous and allogeneic therapies. The systems were designed to process a range of cell types to produce therapies for use in clinical trials and future clinical manufacturing. Projects resulted in functionally closed systems intended for the automation of unit process steps as well as complete manufacturing systems capable of full automation of the entire cell manufacturing process. Unit process solutions included cell selection, cell wash, volume reduction and recovery, electroporation, counterflow centrifugation, cell mixing and suspension, incubation, closed sampling for QC, formulation and fill and finish. Systems processed a range of cell types including PBMCs, dendritic cells, pancreatic islet cells, CAR-T cells, hepatocytes, mesenchymal stem cells, vascular cells, retinal cells, erythrocytes, muscle cells, skin cells and discogenic cells.

Richard was instrumental in initiating Invetech’s cell therapy automation capability and later in growing the Cell Therapy Group to establish the company as a leader in the supply of bespoke, functionally closed, automated systems for cell and gene therapy production. Richard moved to the USA for a second time in late 2017 to take up the role of Chief Product Officer at Massachusetts-based start-up FloDesign Sonics. His role changed to Head of Acoustic Product Development at MilliporeSigma following the Merk KGaA acquisition of FDS in late 2019.

At FloDesignSonics, as Chief Product Officer, Richard created the Product Development group, comprised of mechanical, electrical and software engineers, implemented a New Product Introduction Process and recruited a Quality and Regulatory team to drive the implementation of
a fit for purpose ISO Quality Management System. With these teams he used a mix of internal and external resources to take the acoustic cell washing technology from Alpha prototype to launch in 15 months, In parallel to these activities Richard conducted a search and evaluation process for the selection of contract manufacturers for the equipment and disposable for the “ekko” acoustic cell wash and recovery product.

As Head of Acoustic Product Development at MilliporeSigma Richard doubled the capacity of the engineering and quality teams while simultaneously transitioning and integrating the team into MilliporeSigma/Merck KGaA structure. During this time, as well as reengineering the acoustic cell washing product to satisfy additional Merck requirements, Richard’s Product Development team took the Acoustic Affinity Cell Selection technology from an R&D concept to an Alpha Prototype of an automated device with a soft tooled, closed consumable to be ready for testing with early adopter customers.

In his limited spare time Richard plays cricket, cycles and restores old cast iron woodworking equipment as well as generating sawdust on said equipment. Richard joined DHC as a Master Practice Expert in May of 2023.