Immunotherapy is a relatively new cancer treatment and while it is game changing, it is not without its challenges, including price, availability and scalability.
Allogenic or universal cell therapy is one very promising type of immunotherapy that uses readily available cells from healthy donors to overcome these challenges. Now doctors Muneer Sawaied and Muhammad Yassin, founders of allogenic cell therapy platform, Genecity, have brought things a stage further by developing a novel “blind” or agnostic allogenic T cell to which different types of antibodies can be added. This will greatly expand potential therapeutic options and their solution can target both solid and blood cancers – a first – depending on type.
“Effectively we have created an off-the-shelf therapy which is safe, scalable and affordable so it doesn’t matter how many treatment cycles are involved. The treatment can be prescribed for a patient straight away with no delay. For a certain cohort of patients with immune system limitations, this is their only hope for survival and cure,” says Sawaied.
“At the moment the immunotherapy treatments available are mainly for liquid tumours,” he adds. “Their efficacy is unpredictable. There may be serious side effects and they are very expensive. Our treatment is effective at a fraction of the cost, and if side effects persist, the cells can be eliminated with the use of our suicidal gene.”
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Genicity is an Irish Times Innovation awards finalist in the Life Science & Healthcare category sponsored by Science Foundation Ireland.
