Join a panel on “off-the-shelf” therapies with CEO Alan Trounson

By Leigh Dayton

8 July 2020

Cartherics will take part in the Onco Cell Therapy Summit 2020 virtual conference 8-10 July AEST. Cartherics CEO Alan Trounson, Chief Scientific Officer Richard Boyd and lead scientists will join an international gathering of key decision makers for CAR-T therapies.

The Summit, formerly the CAR-T Congress, is an event that brings industry together to share novel research, manufacturing techniques and regulatory best practice. Sessions also focus on translating data and intellectual property into commercially viable oncological therapies.

Each day of the summit will conclude in plenary room panels that spin out into roundtable discussions to break down the key challenges in major topics to research and development, manufacturing and commercialisation.

Trounson will participate in the final panel of the conference. On Friday he will discuss Allogeneic Therapies, along with moderator Peggy Sotiropoulou who heads Research and Development for Belgium-based Celyad Oncology and Robert Hariri, Founder and CEO of Cellularity in New Jersey.

“This conference is all company people, working to solve some of the problems facing CAR-T therapeutic research and development,” says Trounson. “It’s not easy. There are many challenges, especially in the area of allogenic therapies.”

Trounson notes some of the biggest challenges come in allogenic “off-the-shelf” therapies like those under development at Cartherics. These include ensuring effective treatments without unwanted side-effects such as graft vs host disease, scaling-up treatments for smaller population diseases like blood cancers, and then expanding development of treatments for larger population diseases such and lung and breast cancers.

“We must get them into the pipeline and deliver affordable products,” he adds. “We must do better than charging people a million $AU dollars for therapy. It also needs to demonstrate acceptable efficacy – people need to be confident that the therapy will work effectively to curb their cancer – all pretty challenging actually.”

Set your alarm. The panel will run live 1:50-2:20am AEST.