PRP, Regenerative Cell Therapies and Commercial Cell Banking with Drew Taylor of Acorn Biolabs

Regenerative cell therapy may one day help us all grow our own replacement parts. People with heart failure could get a transplant for an entirely new heart, made out of their own cells. Burn victims, or people who just want wrinkle-free skin, could grow new sheets of the stuff — from their own tissues. Younger cells may provide better raw material for these therapies than older versions, and so a commercial cell banking industry has sprung up to provide the required cryogenic storage for about the price of a Netflix subscription. But is it worth it? To help listeners decide, Medcan Director of Genetics Allison Hazell interviews Drew Taylor of Acorn Biolabs, a Toronto commercial cell banking start-up, with a dissenting opinion from Aaron Levine of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy. 

https://www.eatmovethinkpodcast.com/podcast/ep-67-cell-banking

 

Links

Visit the Acorn Biolabs website to learn more about regenerative cell therapies and commercial cell banking.

 

Hazell and Taylor discussed platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and other regenerative therapies for sports injury. A good explainer on PRP. An Acorn Biolabs blog post on PRP and future therapies for sports injuries. A Mayo Clinic primer on stem cell-based therapies.

 

Learn more about Tel Aviv University 3-D printing that human heart.

 

Find Acorn Biolabs CEO Drew Taylor on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

 

Here’s a good profile of Drew Taylor. Plus a good synopsis of Taylor’s baseball career.

In this episode, Hazell mentions the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy’s Statement of Concern speculative commercial cell banking services. Here’s the statement in full. 

 

The ISCT rep who gave the dissenting opinion is Aaron Levine. He’s an associate professor at Georgia Tech. Learn more about his career. Follow him on Twitter. 

 

Want to learn more about your genetic background and gain insight about future disease risk? Allison Hazell’s Medcan Genetics team has many different services for you. 

 

INSIGHTS 

 

Revolution is right around the corner Regenerative cell therapy and commercial cell banking services are growing more popular, but they’re based on technology that’s been around for decades. So why now? According to Taylor, more than 1,000 clinical trials are happening in the field of cell and gene-based therapies. The Acorn Biolabs founder likes to compare it to the Wright brothers. They successfully flew the first powered aircraft in 1903. An aeronautics industry and commercial flight took decades longer to develop. Stem cell science is undergoing a similar curve. [Time code: 7:10] 

 

PRP and 3D printing of human replacement parts Currently, a goal of regenerative cell technology is to concentrate the growth factors and nutrients in platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and put it at the site of an injury. The idea is that this will enhance the inflammatory response in the surrounding cells and encourage healing. It’s used in soft-tissue sports injuries as well as skin-rejuvenation in dermatology. Another potential use for commercial cell banking is the 3D printing of replacement parts for the human body. For example, at Tel Aviv University, they took a biopsy of skin cells, multiplied them and were able to 3D-print a miniature human heart. “It was a major milestone,” Taylor says. [Time code: 9:30]

 

Taylor’s argument that young cells are better for cell therapies “We need to be thinking about strategies that we could deploy to allow people to actually secure a better cell population to use as a starting material,” Taylor says of his work at Acorn Biolabs. In the past, what he’s found is that adults who are in pain will start looking at regenerative cell therapy. The problem? At that point, the cells and tissues in that area already are in a diseased state. What Taylor wants to help people do is get ahead of these problems by collecting younger, healthy cell samples and storing them for potential further use. “We really need to be thinking about this in advance,” Taylor says. “To be thinking about strategies we [can] do to allow people to secure a better cell population to use as a starting material.” [Time code: 13:55]

 

Counterpoint Aaron Levine is an associate professor at Georgia Tech and a member of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy, where he was a Vice Chair on the Presidential Task Force on the Use of Unproven and/or Unethical Cell and Gene Therapies. The taskforce concluded that “these companies — that will take your cells and freeze them today for potential use sometime in the future — are too far ahead of the science.” Basically, in Levine’s view, the science is not yet there to justify cell storage. “These companies may be over promising to their customers,” Levine says. “The reality is that the vast majority of these cells will remain frozen indefinitely and never used clinically.” [Time code: 23:15]

 

Critical thinking Taylor disagrees with Levine's point that cell banking is speculative — he argues that the science is there and will continue to advance. Not all cell-banking services are created equal, Taylor says. Levine’s investigation also was completed before Acorn Biolabs was founded. “There is a massive difference between companies that offer cell-banking services,” Taylor says, adding that it’s likely that certain organizations probably are over-promising. “Personally, I would be mortified to be grouped in with some of them.” [Time code: 26:47]

Practical applications Although you can never make guarantees in science, regenerative cell therapy is already showing real-world results, Taylor says. This type of therapy could help heal athletic injuries, or be used as an aesthetic skincare treatment. But there are bigger potential uses, too. For example, he says, in Canada 24 patients have had keratinocyte and fibroblast cells harvested and leveraged to create sheets of skin, which were then used to treat severe burns. There are also about a dozen people in North Carolina who have had 3D bladders created using their own cells and implanted in their bodies. “We’re already seeing cells being leveraged in some of these therapeutics,” Taylor says. “So I’d push back a little bit” on Levine’s points. [Time code: 27:40]