

Cell Therapy Innovations for Expanding Treatments for Blood and Immune Diseases with Kevin Caldwell Ossium Health
Kevin Caldwell, CEO, President, and Co-Founder of Ossium Health, discusses the opportunities for regenerative stem-cell therapies and the challenges of obtaining bone marrow from donors for bone marrow transplants. Ossium Health is collecting bone marrow from healthy, young donors and utilizing a cryopreservation process that enables long-term storage and on-demand availability of these cells. Ongoing clinical trials using allogeneic bone-marrow-derived cells to treat patients with acute leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome are showing promising results.
Kevin explains, "Our mission is to improve the health, longevity, and vitality of human beings through bioengineering. We believe that regenerative therapeutics, which involve cell and gene therapies that can permanently and positively improve human biology, will be fundamental to the prevention of disease and the preservation of health as we age. One of the most powerful tools we have in achieving this goal is engineering the immune system. And in particular at Ossium, we develop therapeutics that enable us today in the clinic to treat life-threatening malignancies of the immune system, like leukemia, in patients with dire need. Into the future, the goal is to make it possible to reconstitute, reprogram, and replace a blood and immune system in a manner that can treat patients with chronic diseases and ultimately do so in a preventive manner."
"Traditionally, the major application of bone marrow in the clinic is bone marrow transplants for patients with blood cancers like leukemia. And so the patient's native immune system is ablated or annihilated and replaced with a bone marrow infusion from a healthy donor, related or unrelated. And if that bone, new bone marrow from the donor in grafts in the patient, then it replaces or it constitutes their blood and immune system."
"And so one of the things that we're working on at Ossium is, okay, how do we address these problems? How do we make bone marrow more available to deliver and deploy on demand and easily, without needing to track down a volunteer donor? What can we do to reduce the risk of rejection so that the transplant is safer? What can we do to improve the likelihood of engraftment the first time and the speed of engraftment so the patients aren't immunocompromised for as long? All of these are things that we're working on to really make it possible to bring this lifesaving procedure to more patients."
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