Will cell therapy become a 'third pillar' of medicine?

Public release date: 3-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Jeffrey Norris jeff.norris@ucsf.edu 415-502-6397 University of California - San Francisco

Treating patients with cells may one day become as common as it is now to treat the sick with drugs made from engineered proteins, antibodies or smaller chemicals, according to UC San Francisco researchers. They outlined their vision of cell-based therapeutics as a "third pillar of medicine" in an article published online April 3 in Science Translational Medicine.

"Today, biomedical science sits on the cusp of a revolution: the use of human and microbial cells as therapeutic entities," said Wendell Lim, PhD, a UCSF professor and director of the UCSF Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, and one of the article's co-authors.

Cell therapies have the potential to address critical, unmet needs in the treatment of some of the deadliest diseases, including diabetes, cancer and inflammatory bowel diseases, the scientists said.

The reason, they said, is that cells can carry out functions that can't be performed by small-molecule drugs produced by Big Pharma, or by targeted drugs developed by biotech firms in the wake of the genetic engineering revolution. For one, cells are adaptable. They can sense their surroundings better than today's drugs and can vary their responses to better suit physiologic conditions.

Continued advances in cellular engineering could provide a framework, according to the co-authors, for the development of cellular therapies that are safe and that act predictably.

Joining Lim as co-authors of the Science Translational Medicine article are Michael Fischbach, PhD, assistant professor in the UCSF School of Pharmacy and an expert on the human microbiome, and Jeffrey Bluestone, PhD, executive vice chancellor and provost at UCSF and a leading diabetes and transplant rejection researcher.

The three also have organized a daylong symposium on the potential of cell therapy on April 12, 2013, supported by UCSF and the journal Science Translational Medicine, featuring talks and discussion by some of the nation's leading scientists in stem cell therapy, immunotherapy and the human microbiome the latter consisting primarily of the many hundreds of interacting species of bacteria that live within and upon us.

It has been more than four decades since cells were first used successfully in bone marrow and organ transplants, but the strategies envisioned today are more complex, involving manipulating cells based on new knowledge of how genes program their development and inner workings.

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Will cell therapy become a 'third pillar' of medicine?