Empowered Patient Podcast Predicting Cancer Patient Response by Matching Patient HLA Type with Cellular Therapy HLA Type with Dr. Bill Williams BriaCell
Dr. Bill Williams is the President and CEO of BriaCell, which is bringing a cellular approach to cancer immunotherapy. Building on their knowledge about HLA molecules, BriaCell is genetically engineering multiple HLA types of therapy to match the HLA types of cancer patients. Breast cancer and other cancers like prostate cancer, lung cancer, and melanoma are being explored for treatment with this approach. Individuals have up to 14 different HLA molecules, and BriaCell has seen that a single match is a strong predictor of the success of treatment.
Bill elaborates, "So, what we notice is that with our cellular therapy, we can predict patients that are very likely to respond based on the HLA type of a patient matching the HLA type of our cellular therapy The way that we do this, practically speaking, is we take our cells, grow them under GMP conditions, good manufacturing practice conditions Then after we harvest them, we irradiate them so they can't grow anymore, but they're still alive They are viable, but they don't really grow anymore."
"Then we freeze them down, and they're stable in that state for years, as we have proven at this point. Then, when the patients come in, we can ship them overnight to the clinic, where they can pull them out. Then they're injected into the skin of the patient in the upper back of the thighs to generate a very potent immune response, and the immune response generated will then attack the cancer of the patient."
@BriaCell #Immunotherapy #Tumors #Cancer #BreastCancer #HLATypes