🧬 iPSCs offer advantages over autologous therapies in terms of scalability and cost-effectiveness.
🔬 Allogeneic therapies using cells from healthy donors are a step towards using iPSCs as starting cells.
🔎 The challenge now is to identify super-donors whose cells are resilient to expansion and engineering.
💰 CCRM is leading the way in iPSC cell line generation and is making them more accessible through licensing.
Introduction:
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are becoming an essential starting material for advanced therapies. Sven Kili, chief development officer at CCRM, the Canadian regenerative medicine accelerator, discussed the future trends in biomanufacturing at the London Biotechnology Show in May. He highlighted that advanced therapies are moving towards using iPSCs as the starting cells due to their potential to treat more patients cost-effectively and their ability to be easily engineered for therapeutic use.
- Autologous therapies, which use a patient’s own cells, are limited in their scope as they can only treat one patient per manufacturing lot. iPSCs offer the advantage of treating more patients using allogeneic therapies manufactured from cells taken from healthy donors.
- Identifying healthy donors whose cells are resilient to being expanded and engineered is a challenge, but efforts are being made to find “super-donors” with desirable traits.
- iPSCs are a “blank template” of a cell that can be easily engineered with relevant receptors for therapeutic use. They can be scaled up to treat diseases affecting tens of thousands of patients and are an almost unlimited source of cells that can be generated in a closed process.
- Creating a final cell line from iPSCs requires extensive engineering, processing, and validation work. Companies often show proof-of-concept with autologous cells first before investing in iPSC cell line development due to cost constraints.
- CCRM, in partnership with its subsidiary, is starting to license out iPSC cell lines to make them more accessible to companies that cannot afford the extensive development costs. Keeping costs down for the final users is a priority.
Conclusion:
The use of iPSCs as a starting material in advanced therapies holds great promise for cost-effective treatment of a large number of patients. Identifying suitable super-donors and improving engineering and processing techniques are key areas of focus. Efforts to make iPSC cell lines more accessible and affordable for companies will further drive the advancement of iPSC-based therapies.
