Researchers to discuss on innovative cellular therapies during EBMT meeting

Cellular Therapy is an emerging medical science that is today facing a unique developmental phase, well documented by the outstanding and growing numbers of clinical trials. Such an exponential growth requires proper infrastructures, cell repositories, clinical registries, technical and regulatory guidelines for appropriate cell manipulation and validation of the innovative therapeutic approaches in multicentric clinical trials.

The programme of the 5th Cell Therapy Day was designed in a joint effort by the EBMT Cellular Therapy and Immunobiology Working Party (CTIWP) and the local organising committee.

A panel of international speakers will discuss the following topics during the various sessions: "procedural aspects of minimally-manipulated cell products"; "quality control"; "impact of JACIE in Europe and beyond"; "from Cell Therapy facilities to GMP"; "highlights on new applications" (including the development of CD19-CAR T cells).

The following day, on Tuesday 5 April, the CTIWP will hold its scientific session. New scientific insights will be presented and debated, including the presentation of the prestigious Jon J. van Rood Award for the best paper in the immunobiology of allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

The EBMT Cell Therapy Day and the scientific sessions have become an integral part of the CTIWP's mission. The CTIWP aims at fostering cellular therapy in Europe, through a continuous crosstalk between basic science findings, transplant immunobiology observations and implementation of industry sponsored-trials cellular designed to answer unmet medical needs. Christian Chabannon, Secretary of the CTIWP explains: "The Cellular Therapy and Immunobiology Working Party is taking advantage of the culture and background of the EBMT at this exciting time when we see innovative cellular and gene therapies enter the field concomitantly with a renewed interest of the industry for the field."

In addition, one of the objectives of the CTIWP is to identify centres of excellence that have the additional capacity to design and evaluate innovative cellular therapies on their own. The following example illustrates well this objective: Chiara Bonini, Head of the Experimental Hematology Unit in San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan and Chair of the EBMT CTIWP, launched an outstanding procedure called "TCR-gene editing" allowing to generate a large number of T lymphocytes specific for a given tumor. The results of this innovative technology were published in 2012 in the Nature Medicine journal. Since then, this procedure has been implemented by many transplant research centres around the world. One of them is the Hospital Clinic de Barcelona (HCB) that is currently implementing a platform of development of CAR-CD19 and will launch a clinical trial using this CAR-CD19 in adults and children.