An innovative new major private-public partnership led by Harvard and MIT aims to accelerate one of the hottest and most promising areas of medical research: cell and gene therapy.
An innovative new major private-public partnership led by Harvard and MIT aims to accelerate one of the hottest and most promising areas of medical research: cell and gene therapy.
“I just think it’s a huge opportunity,” said Terry McGuire, a founder of the venture capital firm Polaris Partners and a member of Massachusetts Life Sciences Strategies Group, a panel of academic, government, health-care, and industry officials. “Clearly, [it] is the next great frontier, and it’s going to be hugely important, both from a research perspective and from a clinical perspective.”
Announced Monday, the project, which will bring the universities together with leading local hospitals, major corporations and state officials, will create a new, as-yet-unnamed center for advanced biological innovation and manufacturing and remove a big impediment to research. The new facility, expected to open by the end of 2021, seeks to ensure that Massachusetts will remain a leading region globally for life sciences.
Recent years have seen dramatic breakthroughs in cell and gene therapy, with new approaches attacking genetic maladies like sickle cell disease by repairing or overriding the DNA mutations that cause them. Cancer immunotherapy, meanwhile, tunes the body’s natural defenses to attack cancer cells to which it was previously blind. Such “checkpoint inhibitors” have had nearly miraculous results, completely eradicating cancers that had shrugged off conventional treatment and spread widely through the bodies of dying patients.
Read more at: The Harvard Gazette
