ICKSMCB 2022 / 2022 International Conference of the Korean Society for Molecular and Cellular Biology / September 28 - 30, 2022 / ICC JEJU

Nobel Laureate Lecture

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GenScript



September 30(Fri), 12:40-13:30(50min.), 1F Baekrok Hall

Edward Wong

Unlocking the promise of viral vector and non-viral vector for Gene and Cell Therapy

Edward Wong, Ph.D.
GenScript Biotechnology Pte. Ltd, Singapore

In the past 40 years, gene and cell therapy (GCT) has always been the center of healthcare innovation with the promise to stop or slow the progress of the disease more effectively. In fact, it’s the fastest-growing area of therapeutics.
GCT offers a potential solution to the patients suffering from serious and rare diseases.The mechanism is to correct the faulty gene that causes the disease, such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), certain blood cancers or the inherited metabolic diseases.In fact, numerous drugs for the diseases have been approved.This include the use of autologous CD54+ antigen presenting cells by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), followed by several other allogeneic hematopoietic cell therapies for a limited group of patients with disorders affecting the hematopoietic system.In 2017, the first Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy, known as Kymriah, was approved.Since then, there has been an increased interest and efforts in developing such CAR-T for cancers.
The viral vector or an engineered virus is commonly used to deliver the normal gene into the cell and correct the faulty gene as a result of the inherited genetic disorder. Thereby, the large contract development and manufacturing organizations have invested heavily in this field. But, studies have reported that the manufacturing and testing of effective viral vectors is often a lengthy and expensive process, which can slow the research progress and clinical use.
The emerging of CRISPR technology enabled the researcher to accelerate and simplify the entire genome editing workflow, providing the possibility to correct the existing error in the genome directly and accurately in order to achieve the concept of precision medicine.In fact, several studies have been conducted to reprogram the T-cell in order to express the receptor with improvement, in terms of their tumor recognition ability and binding specificity.
In today’s presentation, you will learn:

  A) The current trend of gene and cell therapy for cancer diseases;
  B) The viral and non-viral based delivery technologies used for gene and cell therapy