Blog | HemaCare

Last week, HemaCare published an article in Technology Networks discussing how optimal apheresis and collection methods give cell therapies a leading edge¹ 

Cell therapy is a unique field because the “products” are derived from living human cells and where each donor is different, variability is inevitable. Quality precursor material gives cell therapy products their best start. Variable or low-quality starting material introduces a need for complex separation strategies or repeated manufacturing runs, leading to higher costs and resource requirements.¹ To ensure the process utilizes the right resources, scientists must adopt optimal apheresis instrumentation and collection methods as one of the most important steps. 

Cell therapy applications are quickly moving into the clinic. Cell quality is critical in providing an end product with optimal therapeutic efficacy. In the previous blogs for this series, we summarized the role of starting material in cell therapy presented by Dr. Burger and then Dr. Minger presented how cells are obtained and grown on an industrial scale.  The next presenter at the HemaCare hosted panel at the International Society for Cell Therapy was Dr. Aby Mathew, Ph.D., a Scientific Advisory Board member at HemaCare and Senior VP & CTO, BioLife Solutions, Inc. presented on best practices in stability and biopreservation of cells.  

HemaCare recently hosted a panel at the International Society of Cell Therapy’s annual meeting on Sourcing, Isolating, Preserving, Shipping and Tracking Biological samples. Previously, we summarized why cell quality is critical in developing cell therapy applications. The goal of cell therapy is to deliver cells to a patient to perform a function. Therefore maintaining the function of the cells is critical for developing cell therapies. At the HemaCare hosted panel, Dr. Stephen Minger (Scientific Advisory Board member of Hemacare and Chief Scientist at GE Healthcare Life Sciences) presented on how over the last 5 years, they have developed large scale amplification of cells for drug development and cell therapy applications.  He summarized the challenges and solutions they have encountered in characterizing large scale lots of human cells.

[pullquote]Bringing cell based technologies to the clinic relies upon one simple thing – the quality of your cells. [/pullquote]