Cancer is a global challenge but there is positive news for cancer patients, particularly those for whom the current treatments such as chemotherapy are not effective. A new game-changing treatment, cell immunotherapy, has been delivering spectacular results and is an entirely new approach to treating cancer. It arms the body’s defenses into fighting the cancer cells from within.
In summary, immune cells are removed from the patient’s blood and “engineered” in such a way that the cells identify and attack the disease when they are re-introduced to the patient. Whilst the performance of these new approaches has been outstanding in treating various types of cancer, the challenge is, they are not cost efficient. Swiss pharma giant, Novartis, made history by being the first company to get FDA approval (August 2017) to market its immunotherapy treatment drug, Kymriah™. However, the price tag for this single dose treatment of $475,000 makes it virtually inaccessible to wider patient communities. The predominant cost critical component lies in the very complex manufacturing process which uses virus based transfection to develop cancer-killing cells. In addition, the inherent complexities of treating sick patients using viruses, pharma companies must queue for as long as multiple years before the virus is available. When the virus becomes available, it can take up to 22 days to complete the cell engineering phase. Every day of the cell engineering process counts as the manufacturing takes place in expensive production facilities (typically costing €1,000 per hour).
At Avectas, our highly-trained team of scientists has developed Solupore® an innovative, rapid and gentle cell engineering technology. The unique selling point of Solupore® is that it eliminates the need for viruses in the manufacturing process. This removes the significant bottleneck faced by the pharma companies in getting these transformative therapies to market AND it allows for a much simpler regulatory pathway enabling the availability of these lifesaving treatments for European patients. In addition, Solupore® reduces the manufacturing time from 22 days to 16 days. In comparison with today’s state of the art, Kymriah™, it is estimated (Reuters August 2017) that the current manufacturing costs of Kymriah™ is about €200k. Solupore® reduces these manufacturing costs to €115,000. This >40% reduction in the cost of goods combined with the elimination of the queueing time for virus production and the simpler regulatory pathway renders these life-changing therapies economically viable thus making them available to a wider patient community. Avectas has already commercialised a suite of products in the regenerative medicine field under the brand name Spraybase® and is now focused entirely on solving the manufacturing challenges in the immunotherapy space.
The overall objectives for this project are to
- To develop a scaled prototype of the Solupore technology.
- To carry out a demonstration (pilot) study with a target customer
- To sign a commercial partnership agreement with a cell immunotherapy company
