Phila. Company Builds Cancer-Fighting Army From Your Own Cells
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Cancer has many foes but none as fierce as you. That's the premise of what's being developed by a company based in Philadelphia.
Adaptimmune gives a patient's white blood cells a shot in the arm "so that they can recognize and destroy cancer," says Gwendolyn Binder-Scholl, the company's executive vice president.
In this form of immunotherapy, T-cells are genetically engineered to defeat the armor that cancer has developed to the body's immune response.
"It can be much less toxic than using chemotherapy in many cases because you're not using a drug -- you're using your own cells," she explains. "So if you can really make them specific for the type of cancer, they can be very potent and the patient has much higher quality of life."
Take synovial sarcoma, for instance, which affects the soft tissue near joints. Binder-Scholl says clinical trials have shown "promising" results.
"And these are patients who don't have any other available treatments," she notes. "They've already undergone surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy and they've failed that. This really offers a hope for those patients."
Once the patient's blood is drawn and white blood cells are isolated, Adaptimmune scientists arm the cells with a viral vector.
"Viruses are great vehicles for transferring genetic material," says Binder-Scholl. "They have evolved basically to do exactly that to get into cells and amplify their genetic material, and that's how they replicate. We can harness that machinery to make a virus specifically and permanently deliver a protein to a patient's T-cells that's then expressed on the surface of the cell and allows that T-cell to recognize the cancer."
Adaptimmune's approach, which engineers a T-cell using its natural protein instead of synthetic receptors, is designed to leave healthy tissue unscathed.
Binder-Scholl recommends patients visit clinicaltrials.gov for more information.
Adaptimmune has its research base in the UK but its clinical headquarters opened at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia in 2011, and its clinical programs were developed at the University of Pennsylvania. Adaptimmune is planning to expand next year into a new US headquarters being constructed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
"The University City Science Center has been crucial for us," says Binder-Scholl. "It allowed us to set up plug-and-play laboratory space and office space. As a small company you don't have a large footprint, yet it's really important to have interactions with other companies nearby on a daily basis. That's something that this area of Global Soft Landing [a program that helps international companies establish themselves in the region's tech and life sciences scene] at the Science Center really has done for us."
