Highlight: TechTalk meeting Advanced Medical Therapy Products

Revolutionizing healthcare through innovation and collaboration is what the Leiden Bio Science Park is all about! Our TechTalks are designed to break barriers, share knowledge and foster (public-private) connections to accelerate this process. This time our TechTalk was about Advanced Medical Therapy Products and identifying hurdles and opportunities to speed up cell and gene therapies’ market access.

Five inspiring speakers, an engaging audience and playful moderation, resulted in a buzzing event full of insightful discussions and interesting take-home-messages:

Davide Integlia – Stressing the need of public and private participation to identify and tackle the market access bottlenecks for ATMPs, with an emphasis on the importance of early Health Technology Assessments as well as leveraging effective multistakeholder collaboration such as ATMP developers, patient organizations, regulatory authorities, reimbursement decision makers and funders.

Helene Roelofs – Representing the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy (CCG) of the LUMC. Sharing their vision to foster innovation and development in the manufacturing of cell and gene therapies as well as providing expert services for ATMP translation, GMP production and regulation. The CCG has been responsible for the development and manufacturing of >20 ATMPs to this day!

Marlen Lauffers – Giving an inspiring insight into the mission of Dutch Center for RNA Therapeutics (DCRT; a collaboration between LUMC, RadboudMC and Erasmus MC) to develop life changing, tailormade RNA treatments for patients with nano-rare germline mutations focused on brain and eye disorders.

Jeroen de Vrij – Taking us into the world of exosome manufacturing, loading and application for the delivery of state-of-the-art gene therapy tools, such as CRISPR Cas. Jeroen proposes their extracellular vesicles as an improved delivery of gene therapies and shared his PoC studies, timeline and ongoing collaborations.

Ion Tcacencu – Sharing his expertise as consultant in manufacturing of ATMPs and providing insight into the decoding of the variability and heterogenicity of the allogeneic cell-based medicinal products. Stressing the importance of the starting material, in vitro expansion & raw materials as well as storage/thawing conditions.

Next TechTalk will be on the 28th of September at Kadans PlusUltra. Collaborating with the reNEW consortium, we will provide the opportunity to meet some of our key experts on regenerative medicine. We are still looking for speakers from the industry, so if you are interested, please contact Hidde Zittersteijn (hzittersteijn@lbsp.nl).