Minaris Advanced Therapies is expanding its partnership with Apprentice.io, taking a digital manufacturing platform that’s been running successfully at its Allendale, New Jersey facility and rolling it out to three more sites, including the company’s own Philadelphia headquarters.
What’s Actually Expanding
Minaris has selected Apprentice.io’s manufacturing execution system, along with its Connected Manufacturing Network, for its Philadelphia, Munich, and Yokohama sites, following a deployment at Allendale that the two companies are calling a success. The Connected Manufacturing Network piece matters as much as the software rollout itself: it’s designed to give Minaris cross-site visibility and let its teams and customers collaborate on manufacturing in real time, rather than treating each facility as its own island of data. Minaris is framing the goal around four things: getting therapies to market faster, keeping quality and compliance airtight across every site, enabling collaboration globally, and making decisions based on real manufacturing data instead of after-the-fact reports.
The Philadelphia piece is the one worth sitting with. Minaris only established its headquarters there in May 2025, and this expansion means the company’s own home base, not just a satellite site, is being built on the same digital backbone as its other global facilities from day one.
Who Minaris Is, and Why Philadelphia
Minaris Advanced Therapies is a fairly new name built out of some long-running expertise. The company was formed in 2025 when Altaris Capital Partners combined two businesses it had acquired: Minaris Regenerative Medicine, formerly Hitachi Chemical’s cell and gene therapy division, and Advanced Therapies, formerly WuXi AppTec’s advanced therapies unit. Its roots actually go back much further, tracing to ViroMed Laboratories in 1982 and Progenitor Cell Therapy in 1999.
Today Minaris operates as a contract development and manufacturing organization, or CDMO, focused specifically on cell and gene therapies, offering everything from viral vector manufacturing and GMP production at clinical and commercial scale to analytical development, cell banking, and biosafety testing. It currently manufactures two commercial cell therapies and runs testing for more than 27 commercial products.
The company picked Philadelphia for its headquarters because the city has become one of the country’s real hubs for cell and gene therapy, and it moved into the former WuXi Advanced Therapies offices at the Philadelphia Navy Yard to do it. That single site now employs roughly 800 of Minaris’s 1,400 global staff, making it by far the company’s largest location. Eytan Abraham, Minaris’s chief commercial and technology officer, described the broader intent behind the company’s platform this way when it launched: Minaris Advanced Therapies exists “to help the industry treat more patients by providing the experience, global footprint, and platforms to accelerate timelines and enable commercialization.”
Who Apprentice.io Is
Apprentice.io has been building manufacturing software for life sciences since it was founded in Jersey City back in 2014 by Angelo Stracquatanio, Gary Pignata, and Alexandra Buttke. The company now describes itself as “The Manufacturing AI Company,” and its client list includes some of the biggest names in the industry, including Moderna, Catalent, and Gilead.
Its core product for deployments like this one is Tempo, a manufacturing execution system built specifically for life sciences, with a no-code setup and built-in GxP validation. Tempo’s whole purpose is replacing paper batch records with digital workflows that guide operators through each step, enforce procedure sequencing, run calculations automatically, and flag exceptions instead of requiring line-by-line manual review. Apprentice.io CEO Angelo Stracquatanio put the stakes plainly when Minaris first adopted the platform: “Our technology has the unique features needed to break down the barriers that have held back commercial-scale cell and gene therapy manufacturing.”
Why AI and Digital Manufacturing Matter Here
Cell and gene therapy has always had a scaling problem that traditional pharma doesn’t face in the same way. Every batch can be tied to an individual patient, the processes are complex and highly manual, and a paper batch record system that might be tolerable for a conventional drug becomes a genuine bottleneck when you’re trying to get a living therapy to a sick patient on a clock. Prakash Manwani, Minaris’s Chief Information Officer, put it directly when the original Tempo deployment was announced: “The potential of regenerative medicine is constrained by the pace, scale, and quality of commercial manufacturing.”
That’s the real story behind a partnership announcement like this one. Digitizing manufacturing execution and connecting sites into a single network isn’t just an IT upgrade, it’s an attempt to remove the actual constraint on how many patients an advanced therapy can reach and how fast it can get to them. As more of these therapies move from early clinical work into commercial-scale production, the CDMOs that can prove they’ve solved that constraint, with real data from real sites like Allendale, are the ones positioned to win the next wave of manufacturing contracts. Philadelphia becoming part of that proof point, right as it’s establishing itself as Minaris’s home base, is a good sign for the city’s standing in the cell and gene therapy world.
