11:00am Chair Introduction

Vincent Ling, Head of Search and Evaluation for Drug Delivery Technologies, Takeda

11:05am Presentation: Enabling the Full Potential of Gene Therapy

• The importance of integrating the drug delivery strategy and the drug development strategy in the earliest stages of development
• Opportunities and challenges at the interface between delivery technology development and drug development
• Is there an opportunity for greater pre-competitive collaboration to strengthen the ecosystem for innovative delivery of gene and cell therapy and accelerate innovation?

Pierre Boulas, Head of Medical Devices and Packaging Development, Biogen

11:20am Presentation: How Do We Produce A Healthy and Highly-Functioning Gene-Edited Immune Cell?

• Solupore is a non-viral transfection process that enables complex, multi-step editing for next-generation cell therapy products
• Primary cells edited using Solupore® retain high levels of stem-cell memory cells with minimal apoptosis
• Following editing with Solupore®, cells demonstrate enhanced functional response and cytotoxicity compared with existing transfection technologies

Justin McCue, Chief Technical Officer, Avectas

11:35am Presentation: Acceleration of Vector Manufacturing for Early-Phase Clinical Testing of CAR-T Cell Therapies

• A rapid inexpensive vector manufacturing process would enable faster early-phase clinical testing of CAR T cell therapies.
• High-speed centrifugation efficiently purifies γ-retroviral vectors encoding multicistronic expression cassettes produced by transient transfection at a scale sufficient for phase I CAR T cell studies.
• This simple downstream process combines high recovery, concentrated viral titres and good impurity clearances; and can be bridged to stable producer cell lines for subsequent larger confirmatory clinical studies

Leila Mekkaoui, Principal Scientist, Autolus

11:50am Presentation: Intelligent Programmable Vectors for New Horizons in Gene Therapy 

• Role of specificity and targeting in the safety of lenti and AAV
• Improving vector titre to decrease costs
• Programmable vectors for enhanced safety and efficacy

Farzin Farzaneh, Chief Scientific Officer, ViroCell Biologics

12:05pm Closing Panel with Q&A

With all session participants