The International Society for Cellular Therapy (ISCT)’s silver jubilee Annual Meeting took place last week in London, United Kingdom. With more than 1300 delegates from academia and industry, it was ISCT’s largest meeting to date, a fact that highlighted the growing nature of the field. Taking place from May 3-6 at London’s ExCeL, this year’s meeting
This week, Akron will attend the International Society for Cell Therapy’s Annual Meeting in London, UK. The meeting takes place from May 3 – 6, 2017 in London (UK) at ExCeL, located in London Docklands. This year’s marks the annual meeting’s 25th anniversary, which will bring together over 1,000 delegates from academia and industry to discuss the
A dichotomy: While efforts to advance new gene therapies to the clinic are progressing at a staggering pace, one drug that had passed such hurdles is now going the opposite direction. Dutch biotechnology company uniQure announced last week it was removing its gene therapy — going by the commercial name Glybera (alipogene tiparvovec) — from the market, by not
Reprogramming of iPSCs has given rise to the emergence of reprogramming approaches that target other types of cells including those of meso-, endo- and ectodermal origin — for example, the generation of functional neurons from fibroblasts which has been reported in a number of recent studies. These are, potentially, therapeutically powerful strategies to target severe and
Novartis has been advancing CTL019, an investigational chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR T) therapy for relapsed/refractory (r/r) pediatric and young adult patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) through clinical trials. Novartis shared insights from the development of the therapy in an opinion manuscript, as a global perspective on the considerations and challenges of
We have written, on multiple occasions in the past, that the cost of biopharmaceuticals, and therapies based on them, is, in large part, dependent on the choice of raw materials used in their development and manufacture. Cost-effective scaleability and manufacturability are important considerations in this regard. Here, we highlight two recent studies that have investigated how natural materials
As new regenerative medicines advance through the clinical pipeline, cryopreservation – most simply described as storage of biological material at sub-freezing temperatures – becomes of increasing importance. While preservation of organs for transplantation involves maintaining organs in an “alive” state in the short window prior to transplantation at 2-8C, cryopreservation requires a different set of
At the end of 2016, the United States Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act. Addressing some of the provisions included in the Act, the FDA followed through, on January 17, 2017, by introducing a new designation process for regenerative advanced therapies, called Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapies (RMAT). On a fundamental level, this new designation provides an
Injectable hydrogels – three-dimensional networks of polymers engineered to be stable in liquid form at room temperature – are attractive for their utility in soft tissue repair. One of their main features is the ability to enhance the delivery and uptake of active drugs and biomolecules. Their utility as carriers of bioactive molecules has, in recent
Researchers at MIT’s Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Draper Laboratory – a not-for-profit research and development company focused on development of technical solutions for health, energy, national security and space – have recently announced the development of microfluidic platforms to accelerate the manufacturing of CAR-T therapies. The current focus is on two platforms: one for enrichment
