Key takeaways from Advanced Therapies Europe

Last month Jason Jones, Global Business Development Lead at Cellular Origins attended Advanced Therapies Europe (ATE). The event  is dedicated to creating change through education and collaboration, offering advanced therapies professionals currently working in Europe, as well as those looking to enter the European market, the platform to meet and partner with fellow pioneers.

Here’s Jason five key takeaways from ATE 24!

Is this the next landmark year?
In talks and discussions there is a widening view that from the approval of Casgevy at the end of last year, to the approvals of BCMA CAR T therapies for 2nd and 3rd line treatment and the first Tumour Infiltrating Lymphocyte Therapy and the first TCR T Cell therapy, both in solid tumours, this is growing to be a new landmark 12 months, in both the nature of the therapies approved and the manufacturing scale that they now require.

Scale, scale, scale
The onus on CGT manufacturers is now very real and very imminent to be able to step up from producing 1,000s therapies a year to producing 10,000s or more. New approaches are needed.

Collaboration
With news releases over the conference and the themes in a growing number of sessions on technology companies combining efforts and combining technologies for common goals, it is clear that our industry has started to do what it has long said needs doing, to work in collaboration to meet the manufacturing challenges at our door.

Decentralised v Centralised. A thing or a just a nice story?
It is clear that many people mean many things when talking about decentralised versus centralised manufacturing in cell and gene therapy. Taking a wider perspective, it is clear that there is spectrum of manufacturing models between the two and the size, number and distribution of facilities will depend on the product, the process and the patient population it is mean to serve.

AI and Machine Learning
The term AI is liberally sprinkled through many a CGT talk or discussion but it is good to see real AI experts coming to CGT from other industries to help us in our challenges. Nevertheless, we must ask if AI in CGT is a case of data lead technology yet? Discussions around the industry imply that we are still in a phase wherein technology is leading data and not data leading technology.  We need to generate process/product data to feed the algorithms and we are doing this now at unprecedented levels

Attending Advanced Therapies Week in January? Make you you come talk to our team to discuss how we’re building scalable cell therapy automation manufacturing solution. We hope to see you there.