How is the Role of Non-Viral Cell Engineering Technology Growing in Advanced Therapies?

Cell and gene therapies (CGT) continue to advance in the pharmaceutical industry. Despite continued investment in R&D, the space still faces significant barriers. Primarily, the expensive nature of the treatments and complexity of manufacturing them.

Maher Masoud, CEO of MaxCyte, spoke with Pharmaceutical Executive about the CGT space and how the industry is working to move past these barriers. Advancements in platform technology are allowing companies to more efficiently partner with manufacturers to improve those processes, while new areas of research (such as non-viral cell engineering) are opening new possibilities.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How is the role of non-viral cell engineering technologies growing in advanced in therapies?
Maher Masoud: It's going to continue to grow. What we're seeing in advanced therapy is the modalities and the number of complex aiding required is only increasing. Right as we go from your basic one edit CAR Ts of years past, you're seeing modalities now where we're doing multiple edits, knock-ins, knockouts.

With cell therapies, that's where you're doing everything outside the body. And on top of that, the reason why it's so critical is from the quality analytics and quality control perspective. With cell therapies and non-viral cell therapies, you can control the safety of the final therapeutic product, and that really lends itself to cell therapies.

It's only going to grow from here. We had some headwinds in years past, but we feel very confident cell therapy, especially non-viral, is where medicines are heading.

PE: How are platform technologies and partnerships shaping the CGT development ecosystem?
Masoud: It's coming together. Platform technologies are shaping it and we're working towards having many different technology providers and platforms come together and work together.

With CDMOs, we can streamline the process and the entire manufacturing process for developers and hopefully get to a day (especially for autologous therapies) where you're dosing patients on a patient-by-patient basis.

You can have more manufacturing done closer to the patient. So, by having developers come together and having manufacturing operation providers and enabling technologies come together to work with CDMOs closer to hospitals, we can make patient accessibility much better than it is right now.