Month: January 2017

The experiments, which took place at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, raise the possibility of off-the-shelf cellular therapy using inexpensive supplies of universal cells that could be dripped into patient’s veins on a moment’s notice.

The ready-made approach could pose a challenge to companies including Juno Therapeutics and Novartis, each of which has spent tens of millions of dollars pioneering treatments that require collecting a patient’s own blood cells, engineering them, and then re-infusing them.

Both methods rely on engineering T cells—the hungry predator cells of the immune system–so they attack leukemic cells.

The British infants, aged 11 and 16 months, each had leukemia and had failed previous treatments, according to a description of their cases published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. Waseem Qasim, a physician and gene therapy expert who led the tests, reported both children remain in remission.

Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers said that because the London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” said Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadephia, and who collaborates with Novartis. “It would be great if it works, but that just hasn’t been shown yet.”

Rights to the London treatment were sold to the biotech company Cellectis but are now being further developed by the drug companies Servier and Pfizer.

Treatments using engineered T-cells, commonly known as CAR-T, are new and not yet sold commercially. But they have shown stunning success against blood cancers. In studies so far by Novartis and Juno, about half of patients are permanently cured after receiving altered versions of their own blood cells.

But commercializing such personalized treatments raises unprecedented logistical headaches. Grupp says Novartis has outfitted a manufacturing center in New Jersey and that patient cells have been flown in from 25 hospitals in 11 countries, modified, then quickly shipped back. Novartis has said it will seek U.S. approval to sell its T-cell treatment for children this year.

The promise of immunotherapy has drawn huge investments, yet many newer entrants are betting instead on the off-the-shelf approach including biotech giant Regeneron, Kite Therapeutics, Fate Therapeutics, and Cell Medica.  

“The patient could be treated immediately, as opposed to taking cells from a patient and manufacturing them,” says Julianne Smith, vice president of CAR-T development for Cellectis, which specializes in supplying universal cells.  

In the off-the-shelf approach, blood is collected from a donor and then turned into “hundreds” of doses that can then be stored frozen, says Smith. “We estimate the cost to manufacture a dose would be about $4,000,” she says. That’s compared to a cost of around $50,000 to alter a patient’s cells and return them.

Either type of treatment is likely to cost insurers half a million dollars or more if they reach the market.

Robert Nelsen, a venture capitalist and a founder of Juno Therapeutics, which raised hundreds of millions for the custom approach, says he’s not worried about companies developing universal alternatives. “What they can do in the future is what we can do today,” Nelsen said in an interview last year. “And I guarantee you even if things were equal, which they are not, you would want your own stuff, not someone else’s cells.”

The London treatment is notable for involving the most extensively engineered cells ever given to a patient, with a total of four genetic changes, two of them introduced by gene editing using a method called TALENS. One alteration made was to strip the donor cells of their propensity to attack the body of another person. Another directs them to attack cancer cells.

In the U.S. and China, scientists are also racing to apply gene editing to make improved treatments for cancer and other diseases.

Robots can put together cars just fine, but less ordered tasks still leave them stumbling. Recent advances have allowed robots to pick up hard objects in unstructured environments, but ask one to pass you a bag of bananas and things get difficult: the fruit varies in shape, it moves within the bag, and it’s delicate.

The online grocery retailer Ocado is trying to change that. It already operates several large and heavily automated grocery warehouses. But all of its goods are ultimately picked by humans, because robots can’t handle the wide variation in size, shape, and structure among the 48,000 different products it sells.

Now, working with a number of universities, its robotics team has taught a soft gripper hand attached to the end of a robot arm to carefully pick up foodstuffs such as apples and bags of limes. Ocado’s Alex Voica says that the device responds to changes in the shape of an item throughout the act of grasping, leading to “carefully choreographed movement of the hand in relation to the object.”

The system is also designed to identify specific contact points on the objects, then close around them like a human hand. The idea is to minimize the amount of bruising inflicted on fruits or vegetables.

Even so, the company has some problems to solve before it uses the devices throughout its warehouses. The experiments show that the device can pick up items placed alone on a flat surface. In a warehouse, on the other hand, they’d likely be piled up on top of each other in a crate, where they might shift as they were picked. Voica says that extra sensing systems and computer vision approaches could help the robot cope with those problems in the future.

There’s also the huge range of products to worry about. Fruit and vegetables are one thing, but a universal picking robot in an automated grocery warehouse would need to be able to grasp everything from, say, a bottle of wine to a croissant with ease and delicacy. Such a feat, says, Voica, “will be one of the hardest challenges to solve.”

Still, the company hopes to use the system commercially “in the near future.” And when it does, hopefully it won’t bruise any bananas.

(Read more: “Robot, Get the Fork Out of My Sink,” “The Robotic Grocery Store of the Future Is Here”)