Problem: Seth Bannon, an investor, recently made an interesting Tweet. “Cell therapies offer INCREDIBLE promise but currently cost $100k to $1m to manufacture PER PATIENT,” he explained. That’s crazy!
Subscribe here to get access to the first 500 ideas from our blog. For just one coffee a month, you can have access to more than $500 billion dollars of ideas. What's not to love?
Solution: Perhaps it’s best to start by describing what Cell Therapy is. As described by the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy,
Cell therapy is the transfer of intact, live cells into a patient to help lessen or cure a disease. The cells may originate from the patient (autologous cells) or a donor (allogeneic cells). The cells used in cell therapy can be classified by their potential to transform into different cell types. Pluripotent cells can transform into any cell type in the body and multipotent cells can transform into other cell types, but their repertoire is more limited than that of pluripotent cells. Differentiated or primary cells are of a fixed type. The type of cells administered depends on the treatment.
Essentially, it involves introducing new and healthy cells into a patient’s body with the hopes that it will replace the diseased or missing cells. While a simple idea, difficulties occur in trying to acquire the critical mass of cells for a transplant and in cases where patients need specialized cells.
One interesting player in this space is Multiply. As described by Endpoints News,
Multiply got started manufacturing a robotics system that can make custom designed pills, often using specific combos — a growing feature in the manufacturing world. Once they get their new system set up for cell therapies, Parietti also believes that there are a number of players in the cell therapy field that can see the advantage of using robots in place of people, working 24/7, without any variations in technique. With no penchant for making mistakes. And no new salary demands.
“Essentially the cell therapy processes are all lab processes adapted for GMP, but they were never created to scale … ,” he says. “People make mistakes. That’s the definition of people.”
“The people are the biggest danger for the drug,” Parietti adds. “In cell therapy you want to protect the drug from the people, not the people from the drug … Our job is to make stuff efficient and automated.”
Most recently, Roche entered this space when they “signed a deal worth $150 million upfront and a total value of more than $3 billion to partner with Adaptimmune on off-the-shelf T cell therapies that marks the cancer giant’s first significant pipeline pivot into next-gen oncology drugs.”
So what does effective cell therapy look like? As described by the British Society for Gene & Cell Therapy, “The oldest example is the bone marrow transplant, which is routinely used in medicine to effectively treat certain diseases of the blood and immune system, such as leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma. The bone marrow transplant contains blood stem cells which can replenish the blood and immune system upon transplantation into the recipient. This type of stem cell treatment has provided an important proof-of-principal for using cell therapies to treat patients.”
As a budding industry, any company that can bring down costs will be playing in a market that was estimated at $7.8 billion in 2020 with a CAGR of 14.5%.
Monetization: Sales of treatments to patient, or a B2B model of selling to other corporations.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)