Empowered Patient Podcast Optimizing Autologous Cell Therapy to Treat Cardiovascular Disease with Dr. Peter Altman BioCardia
Dr. Peter Altman is the President and CEO of BioCardia and emphasizes that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the Western world. BioCardia is developing technologies to treat cardiovascular diseases with cell and cell-derived therapies which allow for precise cell delivery in the heart and technologies associated with optimizing the selection of patients to find those most likely to respond to the therapy.
Peter explains, "In this setting, I think what's unique is there's a technology around that cell processing and around the cell delivery. I think what's most unique is these are autologous cells, as we've said, and because of how we're doing this, we can achieve, in appropriate patients with this point-of-care processing and the efficient delivery, we can deliver and create dosage forms that are not only more significant than others historically but are very inexpensive to provide for the patients. And that means it can have a real boon to the healthcare system."
"Most autologous therapies they talk about are enormously expensive because it requires the cells to be shipped to a centralized laboratory and manipulated and processed and handled. And that impacts, really, the quality of the cells and can impact the safety because they're exposed to laboratories where many other cells are involved."
"By processing them at point-of-care in, really, an almost closed system that's disposable, the patient's cells never leave the cardiac suite in which the procedure is performed, and the disposable cartridge in which they're processed is discarded. So they'll never be in an environment where they would be exposed to any other patient's cells."
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