The field of cell therapy has traditionally resided more
within the academic sphere. However,
over the last two to three years, we’ve seen a shift where big pharma has
become much more involved. This change
has left many speculating about the implications on the industry going forward.
Marty Giedlin, VP of Development with Sangamo BioSciences, will be
discussing some of these implications at the Cell Therapy and Bioprocessing conference. He recently shared a few thoughts with us on
this shift in cell therapy going forward:
Overall, how do you
see cell therapy changing within the next five years?
Marty:
Well, I think it’s going to go to more solid tumor targets and more epithelial
tumors because that’s the hardest nut to crack. I think that’s where people
want to go – the breast cancers, the colon cancers and their related metastases
because that provides a big challenge in how you get --- I mean, you could
maybe find T-cells or TILs within those tumors, but how do you get T-cells into
those tumors because of just the physiological make-up of solid tumors, their
ability to regulate the immune response and other factors that sort of limit
adoptive cell therapy effects? I think we have some of the antibodies out there
like anti-CTLA-4 and PD-1 and others that can sort of overcome some of the immunosuppressive
activities of tumors. So, I think it’s going to be more of a matrix of
immunotherapies that’s going to have to attack solid tumors. Besides the cells,
there is cytokine support or antibody support. So, I think it’s going to be
more academic and big pharma coming together. How can we put these individual
therapeutics together to exact a clinical response?
I think the other thing – particularly with respect to cell
therapies – is more automation. People tend to think of this as a culture flask
business sort of thing. But, I think with the innovations by Miltenyi and their
Prodigy platform and other companies coming in with better plastics and bags
and just cell handling. I think it’s going to be much more
get-it-out-of-the-lab and more of a --- I don’t want to say industrial, but
more of a rapid hands-off sort of way of producing these cells. The goal is
like what you want to do, depending on your source. You want to basically hand
the bag of the raw cells from either the apherisis product or a bone marrow,
tap a button and come back a couple of hours later and get the bag of your – in
our case – gene modified selected cells to then route to the patient. So, I
think those types of things are going to make it much more accessible to a lot
of people, as well.
The last thing is, what more can we actually do to
characterize the product, particularly with adoptive cell therapy? More people
are going for a population approach to taking cells, modifying them and giving
them back. But some sub-populations of cells really have activities that you
want to give back to the patient to get the best results. So, I think more
interest is going into respect to being able to phenotype these cells, do
proteome analysis, look at RNA expression of cell populations and so forth. I
think that’s really going to make things a little easier as far as targeting
the cell population that’s going through the most difference going forth. That
could be easier for us because if it’s a smaller population of cells, it has expansion
capability – whatever – then its few cells that we have to process and it makes
things easier on our end, as well.
Download the brochure for the Cell
Therapy and Bioprocessing conference to check out Marty's full interview.
Get the latest from Dr. Barron and other industry experts at
this year’s Cell Therapy Bioprocessing conference,
September 15-16, Arlington, VA. Now, SAVE 20% off the standard
rate*. Register here and use code XB14188BLOG.
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