Among the current immune therapies for cancer, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-engineered T-cell therapies have provided some of the most impressive clinical results to date 1-3. While CAR T-cells have been most effective in patients with B-cell malignancies, there is hope that that these treatments will also soon demonstrate clinical efficacy in patients with solid tumors.
Thus far, CAR T-cells have been predominantly manufactured from autologous, patient-derived T-cells, in a process that involves several steps. A centralized manufacturing model has been employed for FDA-approved CAR T-cell products, whereby peripheral blood collected from patients is shipped fresh or frozen to the offsite manufacturing facility, and the manufactured cells are shipped back to the site of origin in a cryopreserved form for administration.
