Empowered Patient Podcast Scalable MSC Platform Enabling Next Wave of Stem Cell Therapies with Dr. Kilian Kelly Cynata Therapeutics
Dr. Kilian Kelly, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Cynata Therapeutics, has taken on the challenge of manufacturing stem cell therapies consistently and at scale in order to drive the advancements necessary for the next generation of regenerative medicine. Cynata is employing a novel approach that utilizes a single source of pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and mesenchymal cell ancestors (MCAs) to generate mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). Lead programs are targeting graft-versus-host disease, osteoarthritis, and diabetic wounds, where clinical trials have shown great promise to treat these and other diseases.
Kilian explains, "We're a stem cell regenerative medicine company, and what we're trying to do is to change the way that we can manufacture stem cell therapies in a consistent and scalable way. I'm sure many of your listeners have heard about stem cell therapies of various types. The particular type of cells that we're working on are called mesenchymal stem cells or MSCs. They've shown lots of promise for lots of different purposes, but a real challenge has been making these cells consistently, especially when you try to do that at a large scale. We have a unique novel manufacturing platform, which helps us to address that major challenge."
"The way that these cells were historically produced and indeed still are produced in most cases is by harvesting cells from, for example, somebody donating bone marrow or adipose tissue, also known as fat. And those approaches have certainly allowed a lot of early-stage clinical trials to be performed, which showed lots of really exciting results. But often what happens is that when you move to a larger scale using such a process, and you try to make much larger quantities of cells, perhaps using many different donors, you start to see a lot of inconsistency. There are a few reasons for this. When you have inconsistency with a product, it's inevitable that you're going to get inconsistent results."
"If you have inconsistent results in a clinical trial, it becomes a bit of a lottery, and sometimes you can have very disappointing results that are hard to explain. So we think that's been a really big issue that has caused a lot of problems in the field. And aside from the impact on clinical trial results, we also need to think about the future when these products are available and on the market, and how you can actually, in practical terms, produce enough of these products. So, in a nutshell, I think that is probably the major challenge that the field has faced."
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