What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
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Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#2I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing.
One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day.
I think most are 3+ weeks sample to treatment right now. Still amazing though.
Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#3I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing. One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day. I t…
There are a number of companies working on 'in vivo' deliveries for CARs. Oftentimes using the same tools as proven out by the Moderna vaccine.
Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#4I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing. One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day. I t…
The 'vein-to-vein' time (apheresis to infusion) is being shortened all the time, and you can already manufacture CAR-T cells in 24-48hrs, but it still takes about a week to clear quality assurance and release the product (microbiology, integrated copy number, integration site testing, autonomous growth potential etc). The reason being mostly that you don't want to accidentally replace patient's B cell cancer with a T cell cancer of your own making.
Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#5I am watching someone go through this treatment at the moment. I was trying to describe the process to a friend and after giving my understand had to follow up with "it seems fantastical, or like magic, in a way that is hard to wrap my head around."
The monitoring time post treatment seems like it might be a bigger bottleneck than the production time but it could be that as the side effects and likelihoods are better understood then that level attention might be reduced. I was told that currently there are only two production facilities, one on each side of the country.
During the blood collection recently one of the nurses talked about the possibility to work on sickle cell anemia and how they were hoping to start treating people. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/31/1208041...
Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#6I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing. One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day. I t…
> The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day.
How do you imagine that would work?
Some closed-pipeline machine that lives in the hospital and automates sample → modified sample culture cycle?
Or something stranger, e.g. some kind of injectable (maybe prokaryotic?) cells that actively swim around looking for L-lymphocytes to vectorize through bacterial horizontal gene transfer — such that the whole process happens in vivo?
Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#7I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing. One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day. I t…
There are a number of companies working on 'in vivo' deliveries for CARs. Oftentimes using the same tools as proven out by the Moderna vaccine.
Yes, but that way you lose control over the dose, and to an extent over CAR-T characteristics. CAR-T therapy is usually used in patients who already had multiple rounds of chemo and their immune cells are generally not in a great shape. Even with 'traditional' CARs you occasionally get manufacturing failures since the cells are too exhausted to expand in vitro or have already lost their effector functions.
Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#8I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing. One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day. I t…
> The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day. How do you imagine that would work? Some closed-pipeline machine that lives in the hospital and automates sample → modified sample culture cycle? Or something stranger, e.g. some kind of injectable (maybe prokaryotic?) cells that actively swim around looking for L-lymphocytes to vectorize through bacterial horizontal gene transfer —…
> Some closed-pipeline machine that lives in the hospital and automates sample → modified sample culture cycle?
That's already a thing, for example Lonza's Cocoon platform or Miltenyi's Prodigy (both are often used for on-site manufacturing).
Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#9I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing. One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day. I t…
Considering leukemia treatment today is 2 years for girls and 3 years foe boys, 3weeks is several magnitudes worth of improvement.
Re: What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi
#10I work in the OT/automation space for pharma. Cell and gene therapy is crazy amazing. One thing I didn’t really see mentioned here is length of treatment. They have to collect patients sample at hospital or other facility, transport to production facility, grow sample, inject sample with vector, grow some more and then reintroduce. The real sci-fi moment will be when they get to the point they can treat in a day. I t…
Considering leukemia treatment today is 2 years for girls and 3 years foe boys, 3weeks is several magnitudes worth of improvement.
The treatment itself is a one-day procedure (although the patients will be generally kept under observation for CRS for a few days and then regularly monitored for response), the 3 weeks is the time needed for manufacturing/QC. In that time patients receive bridging chemotherapy until the CAR-T product is ready and unfortunately some do not make it.