Novartis-Penn Center for Advanced Cellular Therapeutics |
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March 01, 2016, Volume 62, No. 25 |
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(left to right) Jonathan Epstein, MD, Executive Vice Dean and Chief Scientific Officer, Perelman School of Medicine; Ralph Muller, Chief Executive Officer, University of Pennsylvania Health System; Glenn Dranoff, MD, Global Head of Exploratory Immuno-oncology at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research; William Ludwig, First patient to receive CTL019 T cell therapy, in summer 2010; Bruce Levine, PhD, Director, Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility, University of Pennsylvania Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine; Carl June, MD, Program Director, Translational Research, Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute; Chi V. Dang, MD, PhD, Director, Abramson Cancer Center; J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD, Executive Vice President, University of Pennsylvania for the Health System and Dean, Perelman School of Medicine. |
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Physicians, scientists and leaders from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the global pharmaceutical company Novartis gathered recently to unveil the Novartis-Penn Center for Advanced Cellular Therapeutics (CACT). Located on Penn Medicine’s campus amidst both clinical care and laboratory facilities atop the Jordan Medical Education Center and South Pavilion Extension of the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, the CACT is poised to become an epicenter for research and early development of personalized cellular therapies for cancer, expanding on Penn’s groundbreaking research using Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) technology, which enables a patient’s own immune cells to be reprogrammed outside of the body and re-infused to hunt for and potentially destroy tumors.
“In only a few years, we have generated significant achievements that have moved the field of personalized cellular therapies forward, opening clinical trials to test these treatments not only for patients with blood cancers, but also those with solid tumors,” said Carl June, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of pathology & laboratory medicine and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. “The CACT will allow us to leverage this progress to develop and test new approaches more quickly and expand our ability to manufacture personalized cell therapies for a greater number of trials.”
The new facility is a marquee component of Penn’s translational science efforts to expedite the development of novel therapies for many types of disease. The collaboration with Novartis was announced in August 2012, when the two organizations entered an exclusive global research and licensing agreement to further study and commercialize novel CAR therapies. The $27 million CACT was constructed in part through a $20 million investment from Novartis, and will employ 100 highly specialized cell therapy professionals working across 6,300 square feet of “clean room” space for cell engineering and 23,610 square feet of laboratory and cell therapy manufacturing space with the capacity to manufacture cellular therapies for up to 400 patients per year (Almanac September 30, 2014).
“The opening of the Novartis-Penn Center for Advanced Cellular Therapeutics is a significant milestone in our collaboration with Penn,” said Mark C. Fishman, president of Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. “It is our hope that discoveries will be made at this facility that could one day lead to new medicines to help cancer patients around the world.”
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Rendering of CACT Corner Room |
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