2024-10-11 03:15:00
Genetic modification of cells from a cancer patient, at the Kite pharmaceutical factory, Amsterdam, November 2021. GILEAD
This September afternoon, a team is busy in the shipping area of the Kite pharmaceutical factory, located in Amsterdam, near Schiphol airport. Carefully, an employee moves around a small blue container on wheels, a dry shipperwhose silhouette is strangely reminiscent of that of the robot R2-D2 in Star Wars. Inside: a 67 milliliter frozen bag filled with “reprogrammed” cells, and carefully surrounded by liquid nitrogen to ensure strict conservation at − 180 degrees. In a few hours, she will fly to France to treat a patient with relapsed cancer.
The recipient of this precious treatment is not a patient chosen at random. This is the same patient to whom the cells contained in the small frozen bag belong. A sort of return to sender. With one major difference: T lymphocytes, these cells essential for triggering an immune response, have been expertly rearmed to transform themselves into cancer-exterminating soldiers.
Hence their visit to Amsterdam, where Kite, a subsidiary of the American laboratory Gilead, has had a factory dedicated to the manufacture of these cutting-edge treatments since 2020. “We invested 185 million euros to install this factory which serves the entire European continent”details Pierre Sinet, the medical director of cellular therapy at Gilead in France. In the past, patients’ cells were sent to the United States. “This saved us a week in the manufacturing process. Every day counts because the patients are very sick and cannot wait”he continues.
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The American laboratory is one of the few in the world to produce this type of cell therapy, considered by many doctors as one of the most promising solutions to cancer. Because this technology is still in its infancy. The first CAR-T therapy, Kymriah, launched by the Swiss Novartis to treat acute childhood leukemia, was approved in August 2017. Since then, only five other treatments, all targeting blood cancers, and two of which are marketed by Gilead (Yescarta and Tecartus), have joined the market.
Complex mechanics
If these products arouse the enthusiasm of the medical profession, it is because they offer, thanks to a single infusion carried out in less than thirty minutes, an unexpected chance of remission to patients who are often doomed, when chemotherapies or immunotherapies are indicated. first-line or second-line treatment have failed. In diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, one of the blood cancers where Yescarta is approved, about half of patients are still in remission four years later. This effectiveness also comes at a price: sometimes severe side effects during the first weeks, which may require admission to intensive care.
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