On 12-14 February 2018, we held our inaugural Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult Seminar Series event at Guy’s Hospital, London, welcoming a wide spectrum of the cell and gene therapy community to come together and understand more around ensuring commercial success for development of their advanced therapies.
The three-day event delivered an over-arching view of the key health economic, intellectual property, regulatory, clinical, manufacturing, analytical and investment considerations for developers at all stages of the development pathway, enabling both the immediate and future development needs of their therapy to be met on the road to commercialisation.
The first day of the event appealed to those in the early stages of the development pathway including academia, researchers and smaller SMEs to give insight the kind of challenges that they can expect to encounter as they work towards their first in human clinical trial.
Ed Hodgkin, Partner, Syncona, spoke about building a sustainable cell therapy business
On day two, we focused on late stage development considerations for those looking to embark on phase II clinical trials and heading towards commercial success.
We welcomed the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI) on day three to host a joint Cell Therapy – Tracking, Circulation and Safety (CT-TRACS) committee and seminar event, bringing together an international network of experts from multiple sectors (public and private sector researchers, regulators, clinicians, health foundations, and technology developers) to share knowledge, experience and resources in the rapidly evolving field of cell therapy.
Finally, we also held a manufacturing workshop on day three, providing further insight into smart and scalable manufacturing solutions to address the current challenges and limitations of traditional manufacturing strategies.
Attendees were also given the opportunity to network at Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult's offices, Guy's Hospital, London
We drew on a wealth of internal expertise from across the CGT Catapult to help deliver the seminar presentations and invited several external expert speakers with specialist skill sets to provide further insight on the various topics that were covered.
Feedback from the event has been particularly positive and many of the delegates have said they will return to their academic and industry organisations with a better understanding of the challenges and complexities in taking cell and gene therapy through to commercialisation. Others have said that learnings from the seminar presentations can be applied to their own research to ensure their own therapies have the greatest chance of success.
I’ve found the last few days very interesting and it’s been a real eye-opener for me around different industry perspectives. I’m delighted I came on this course as it’s been very helpful.
We are also looking at taking a truncated version of the event to university research hubs across the UK to provide additional guidance and support on how best to dynamically approach successful commercialisation of their own advanced therapy products.