With a 20-year experience in cancer immunotherapies, Neil Sheppard, comes back on the early days of CAR-T cell therapies, talking about Novartis, U. Penn, Juno, Kite…
Transcript:
The cell therapy field has been around for a long time but it was purely of academic interest.
So the whole TIL process is kind of horrendously complicated. You need to take surgically excised tumor tissue and digest it etc. So it’s very difficult. But really so big pharma hasn’t really been interested in cell therapy until much more recently. So, my current boss, Carl June, he published in 2012 – so 10 years ago – some really stunning responses in patients with leukemia and lymphoma treated with the CD19 CAR therapy. And that kind of surprisingly and amazingly Novartis, the big drug company Novartis, engaged with that right away. So, that’s when big pharma really started taking notice. Although I think it’s also fair to say that they were an outlier. So the other big pharma companies didn’t jump in at that time. The kind of CAR-19 race was between Novartis with U.Penn. And also players like Kite and Juno, which were biotech companies of course.
Biotech companies take up generally quite a lot more risk than big pharma companies. And it wasn’t until years later that they were acquired by various big pharma and bigger biotech companies. And so, the cell therapy field is really kind of moving into the big pharma.