[HN Gopher] What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy agai... ___________________________________________________________________ What we are doing today with CAR-T cell therapy against cancer seems like SciFi Author : belter Score : 41 points Date : 2023-11-03 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (english.elpais.com) (TXT) w3m dump (english.elpais.com) | procarch2019 wrote: | I 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. | jfarlow wrote: | 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. | puzzlingcaptcha wrote: | 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. | puzzlingcaptcha wrote: | 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. | derefr wrote: | > 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_? | puzzlingcaptcha wrote: | > 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). | orochimaaru wrote: | Considering leukemia treatment today is 2 years for girls and 3 | years foe boys, 3weeks is several magnitudes worth of | improvement. | puzzlingcaptcha wrote: | 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. | dendrite9 wrote: | I 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... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-03 23:00 UTC)