London, December 13 – MarketsandMarkets interviewed Petter Björquist, CEO, Verigraft regarding 4th Annual MarketsandMarkets Bioprocessing of Advanced Cellular Therapies & Regenerative Medicine Congress taking place on 10-11 March 2020 in London – UK. Petter Björquist is a PhD in Biology/Biochemistry from Gothenburg University, 50 + publications in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters and patents.
Q. What is the most trending areas of cellular therapies currently?
A. I would say that is 1) CAR T-cell Therapy. This field has exploded, and started a new era in cancer treatment. 2) Genome engineered cells for therapy in general. Advances in the tools for cell-engineering have made this field overcoming many critical hurdles like safety and production costs. In addition to this, I think as sole disease treatment I would say that a cure for diabetes using insulin producing cells derived from stem cells is an unbeatable opportunity.
Q. What are the recent developments and technological advancements?
• The patient’s own T cells can now be extracted, modified, activated, expanded, purified and returned to the patient at higher scale, and at lower costs
• The general advances in the field of genome engineering has finally made in vivo genome engineering possible. Therefore, a number of gene-therapies are now underway. Please note that not only rare diseases are now targeted with genome engineering, even “single patient disease” is now reality, i.e. that only one person on this earth is having a disease, and can potentially be treated
• Tissue personalization and 3D bioprinting together have recently made great leaps towards clinical reality. Bioprinted organs are still a few years ahead in the future, but bioprinters may be used to produce scaffolds for tissue-engineering
• The patient’s own T cells can now be extracted, modified, activated, expanded, purified and returned to the patient at higher scale, and at lower costs
• The general advances in the field of genome engineering has finally made in vivo genome engineering possible. Therefore, a number of gene-therapies are now underway. Please note that not only rare diseases are now targeted with genome engineering, even “single patient disease” is now reality, i.e. that only one person on this earth is having a disease, and can potentially be treated
• Tissue personalization and 3D bioprinting together have recently made great leaps towards clinical reality. Bioprinted organs are still a few years ahead in the future, but bioprinters may be used to produce scaffolds for tissue-engineering
Q. What are the key take away points from your presentation?
• Transplantation is made possible without the severe risks of immunosuppression, and so far incurable diseases can now be targeted!
• Fully biological transplants can now be personalised!
• Tissue engineering can now be applied at lower costs and higher scale!
• Tissue engineering is now a clinical reality!
Q. At which platforms the bioprocessing and advanced therapies community is most active?
A. . I would say that everything around viral vectors and what else is needed for gene-therapies are a very hot field. Bioprocessing in this area as taken considerably, and important steps last few years (see above).
Q. Hope you had a chance to go through the attached agenda. Please share your feedback on the same, also do let us know which community would be moist benefitted by the agenda.
A. Yes, I have walked through the agenda. I think it will be a very good conference, especially if you will attract a “critical mass” of attendees. I guess commercial players from the biologics bioprocessing field would benefit the most.
Petter Björquist will present on ‘Personalised organs that will revolutionise future medicine’ at the event.
The latest conference agenda and complete speaker line-up is available to download on the conference page, where you can also register – https://bit.ly/2qKzuSC
For more inquiries contact Suraj Waghmare, Marketing Executive on [email protected]
