How Companies Are Programming Your Immune Cells To Fight Cancer

Will Rosellini is an experienced entrepreneur and executive in the biotech and medtech fields who has founded and led multiple companies bringing innovative technologies to market, with a background spanning law, business, and the sciences.

He is currently the President of CytoImmune Therapeutics.

Here are the topics of discussion:

02:20 Will Rosellini Background

• Got 6 graduate degrees
• Got involved with life sciences companies for 20 years
• One company developed a technique to help rehabilitate after stroke
• Now working with CAR-NK immune therapies
• These involve gene editing cells and inject them back in the body to help with immunity

05:48 How are Immune Cells Being Used to Fight Cancers?

• For the past 10 years, immune T-cells were being programmed to attack specific kinds of cancers
• These cells were taken out of the patient and then gene edited
• The problem is that the CAR-T cells cause toxicity in the body
• Another way to do this is to create IPSC stem cells that can create similar cells that fight cancers etc.
• Cell therapies are being used for ALS and Parkinsons, endothelial cells, heart cells, beta cells, nerve regrowth

10:50 How expensive is gene editing therapy?

• Anywhere from 400K to millions of dollars

11:45 How are stem cells being created?

• This creates a single cell that turns into CAR-T or CAR-NK in it
• Cancers are smart at hiding

15:05 Difference between CAR-T and CAR-NK immune cells for fighting cancer?

• CAR-T just need to be given once
• CAT-NK needs to be given multiple times
• CAR-T has more toxicity, while CAR-NK has none
• For this reason CAR-NK therapy is more effective

18:17 How do these cells attack cancer cells?

• They take a natural killer cell and get it to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)
• This CAR recognizes a cancer

20:00 What’s the near timeline for cancer treatments?

• 100 different types of cancers may have approved therapies
• One surgery, one chemotherapy and one immunotherapy
• Also neurological disorders like ALS, blindness may be cured in the next few years

25:15 CytoImmune has an engineering platform for encoding natural killer cells

• They want to partner with companies to encode natural killer cells with other companies
• They are working on non small cell lung cancer

28:10 Where can people find out more about Will and cytoimmune?

• You can go to CytoImmune
• Check out Will’s website here