Transcript:
For us, first of all, we want to use the setting of autologous therapy to just do a more simple validation to show that the cells are safe and effective.
So in order to make it simple, we specifically tried to go into a patient population that doesn’t have autoimmmunity against the islet cells.
We have selected patients who had pancreatectomies, and they didn’t seem to have any islet autoimmunity.
I think to widely apply the therapy… you cannot argue with the business case of using allogeneic cell source.
That’s how you are able to produce trillions and trillions of cells.
But then immunology – and immune reaction – is still the biggest hurdle.
I think gene editing has a lot of promise, and I’m hoping it will work out.
I think autologous, at the current timepoint, unless we can significantly lower the cost of doing this personalized therapy, I think it will be really difficult to do it widely, for all the patients.