NEW YORK – The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) on Thursday announced a partnership with the Brazilian National Cancer Institute (INCA) to expand access to CAR T-cell therapies among pediatric patients in Brazil.
With a $4 million grant from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, CHOP and INCA plan to build a CAR T-cell therapy manufacturing center at INCA in Rio de Janeiro. The partnership is part of CHOP's initiative to expand access to CAR T-cell therapies in low- and middle-income countries at a fraction of their commercial cost with the help of a closed-system, automated manufacturing platform, dubbed Prodigy.
The Prodigy system, a product of Miltenyi Biotec, has its own controlled environment, reducing the need for specialized clean rooms and air handling. CHOP oncologists have already been using Prodigy to manufacture CAR T-cell therapies for patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) for several years and have designed US Food and Drug Administration-approved protocols to treat patients with these therapies.
"While immunotherapy is now generally available for pediatric patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia in Brazil, the public health system struggles to pay for its steep price," Stephan Kadauke, the associate director of CHOP's Cell Based Therapy Laboratory, said in a statement. "Traditional CAR T-cell manufacturing is costly, in part due to its complex, lengthy process that requires highly trained staff to manage every step of the manufacturing operations."