Engineering Better Medicines from our Own Cells
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Krystyn Van Vliet |
TEDxMIT
• May 2019
Cell therapy is one of the key medicines of the future, where living cells are delivered to the body as the medicine. Those cells can be the perfect drug factory when delivered inside the body, but we have to manufacture enough of those cells outside the body first.
The future has already started, but these are early days of discovery and challenges for making the cells that could cure cancer, speed healing after brain injury, and help our bodies repair our own aging body parts. Tomorrow, cell therapy will include several types of stem cells, progenitor cells, and function-committed cells.
Some will require cells to go from one donor to another patient. Some will have the donor and the patient be the same person, by first handling and “fixing” the cells outside the body. Some will be modified genetically to introduce new functions, whether by CRISPR or other approaches we have not imagined yet.
The challenge lies in how to make – how to manufacture – these living biological cells as a uniform, reliable, safe, and fast-to-make-and-deliver product. That takes new technology, new engineering, and new understanding of how cells interact with the outside world of the materials around them as one cell becomes two, two become four, and so on.
We are on the cusp of harnessing new ways to make cell therapy a possible cure available to many patients for many diseases. To do that, we have to measure the quality of the cell product (easy for aspirin, hard for cells) without changing the cells, ideally without touching the cells, and for all the cells that we deliver to the patient. That is a biological engineering challenge, and we are up to it!