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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