The COVID-19 pandemic continued to disrupt lives across the globe in 2021, but that didn’t keep the cell and gene therapy industry from advancing. With many new regulatory approvals anticipated in 2022, the industry shows no signs of slowing down. We look back at 2021 and ahead to 2022 and beyond.
For cell and gene therapy companies developing allogeneic therapies, including allogeneic CAR-T or T-cell immunotherapies, getting high-quality starting material from healthy adult donors is critical to the success of their therapies. But, what is it like to be the allogeneic donors who get the call asking them to be volunteer donors? And why would they…
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies and other new immune effector cell therapies are offering hope for many patients with relapsed and refractory leukemia, lymphoma and other blood cancers. However, these therapies also have known serious side effects, including cytokine release syndrome (CRS) and immune effector cell neurotoxicity syndrome (ICANS). Because the definitions and…
Once discarded as medical waste, cord blood is now recognized as a valuable source of stem cells that is simple to collect and store, rapidly available and is less likely to promote an immune response. Perhaps most significantly, cord blood transplant has historically not required a perfect HLA match due to the relative immaturity of…
The field of cancer immunotherapies was buoyed last year by the FDA’s approval of the first autologous CAR-T drugs on the market, Novartis’ Kymriah and Gilead’s Yescarta. But, many drug makers are already looking in a new direction — off-the-shelf, or allogeneic, CAR-T therapies. In autologous therapies, like Kymriah and Yescarta, scientists isolate T cells from…