Reviewing the State of Gene Editing to Make Cells Compatible Between Donor and Recipient

A sizable level of funding in academia and industry is devoted to the goal of enabling cell transplants between different individuals, with large and well funded pharma companies such as Astellas, Sana, and others involved. This would allow for the creation of cost-effective cell therapies of all sorts, in which the donor cells used in every patient originate from the same few well-vetted and well-controlled cell lines. Logistics is everything in the realm of cell therapies, and the reason why autologous cell therapies, such as CAR-T treatments for cancer, are so expensive is that every treatment site must have the ability to extract cells from the patient, engineer them, slowly expand their numbers over weeks in carefully monitored culture conditions, and then perform quality control before use. Compare this with a universal cell line that is manufactured in one central location, with cells frozen down in a standardized way for storage, transport, and then use by any clinic capable of performing an infusion. It is a very different picture of cost and difficulty. Regenerative medicine has come a long way since the derivation of the first human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC). As a community, we have become better at sourcing stem cells, differentiating them into therapeutic cell types and transplanting them to cure different diseases. To unlock the full potential of stem cell therapies, we need to overcome the immune barrier to transplantation. The human immune ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs