Cell Therapy Promise Highlighted at UCSF Symposium

David Baylink, MD, left, professor of medicine at Loma Linda University, asks a

question during the bacterial therapeutics panel discussion at the Cell-Based

Therapeutics symposium at UCSF, while Carl June, MD, right, listens.

Old-line pharmaceutical companies and maturing biotech businesses both are graybeards compared to newer ventures focused on cell therapy.

With cell therapy the drugs are alive. Cells are engineered and reprogrammed outside the body to perform specific tasks and then given as treatment.

Cells are like soft robots, said Wendell Lim, PhD, director of the Center for Systems & Synthetic Biology at UC San Francisco and an organizer Cell-Based Therapeutics: The Next Pillar of Medicine, a daylong symposium held at UCSFs Mission Bay campus last month.

Lim and other scientists aim to take advantage of the modules that already function within cells, and to manipulate them for specific therapeutic goals sometimes by introducing new functions.

We want to build therapeutic cells with precisely controlled activities, Lim said. We want to control how cells proliferate, where they go, how they are activated and how to turn them off or even destroy them when they are no longer needed.

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Cell Therapy Promise Highlighted at UCSF Symposium