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Imagine microscopic soldiers designed to enter the body’s ecosystem to attack a brain tumor or regenerate damaged heart tissue. Scientists are rethinking human cells to find and solve problems in the body.
UCSF Launches $ 250 Million Living Therapy Initiative to Accelerate Research in This Promising Area of Disease Control Studies to Advance the Treatment of Diseases such as Cancer, Autoimmune Diseases and Diabetes .
The initiative was announced Thursday, three weeks after UCSF announced its partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. to build a cell therapy development and manufacturing facility at its Mission Bay campus. UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood said the partnership was a critical end-point in establishing the institute, which has been in development for several years.
Hawgood said the emergence of cell-based therapies is “a generational shift” for medicine similar to the arrival of aspirin. The UCSF hopes to move cell therapies from scientific concept and clinical trial stages to regulatory approval and production.
“Cells have amazing tools and networks of molecules – they’re incredibly complex,” said Hawgood. “In the tiny packaging of a cell, there is incredible intelligence. “
Living cell therapies are when human and microbial cells are modified or designed to treat or cure disease. The first approved types of living cell therapy are used to treat certain blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.
Hawgood said he hopes the initiative will expand the use of these types of cell therapies and open up treatments for difficult conditions such as malignant tumors and autoimmune diseases.
The aim of the initiative is to foster collaboration in an often siled scientific research world and to support pathways leading to regulatory approval. About three-quarters of the $ 250 million comes from donations, and the rest will be covered by the university, Hawgood said.
The initiative will launch a grant program this fall to give more than $ 50 million to UCSF faculty members working on living cell therapy.
A number of UCSF professors conduct studies in cell therapy, including Wendell Lim, professor and chair of the university’s department of cellular and molecular pharmacology. His research includes understanding how living cells are genetically encoded to monitor and respond to their environment. His research lab is exploring how to reorganize cells so that they respond to human disease in a beneficial way.
Lim, who along with Hawgood is on the steering committee of the Living Therapeutics Initiative, said researchers are studying how living cells can be formed to infiltrate disease ecosystems, decipher problems, and “reframe this ecosystem in a positive way. “.
Lim compared the way most drugs work to the reactive nature of living cells.
“A drug is going to bind and stick and block activity, which can have really big effects, but it’s not alive, it doesn’t sense and it doesn’t make decisions,” Lim said. “What a cell can do is it can move around the body, feel things, make decisions, and have more complex responses.”
Other researchers at UCSF are considering how these types of therapies could be developed to treat disease in utero in fetuses, regenerate tissue damaged by age or disease, and treat infectious diseases such as HIV.
“We’re not going to change the world tomorrow, but we believe we’re on the brink of a therapeutic revolution,” Hawgood said.
Julie Johnson is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: [email protected]. On Twitter @juliejohnson.
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