Invent: Life Sciences

Invent: Life Sciences Episode 2
Speakers: Stuart Lowe, Matthew Durdy, & Alexander Seyf
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Stuart: When was the last time you thought about how the medicines you take are manufactured? It's something that rarely enters our everyday concerns, given that bottles of pills have been sold for over a century. And even as a patient, you're not really worried about whether your medicine will be made in sufficient quantities or whether it'll arrive on time.
However, these are real concerns for some of the patients receiving breakthrough cell and gene therapies. They are amongst some of the most complicated medicines ever manufactured and they are shown to be incredibly effective.
For instance, some of the data on long-term remission has prompted people to claim that they could be the next cure for cancer. But with complex production processes, arduous supply chain and life critical logistics, manufacturing cell and gene therapies at scale is still a considerable challenge.
Could digitization and the application of AI provide a breakthrough in manufacturing? Would more companies be willing to work together on standardisation, provide more flexibility and ultimately a route to scale?
Join me Stuart Lowe as we plug into Invent: Life Sciences, a podcast brought to you by technology and product development company, TTP. Today, we ask can partnerships in the cell and gene industry transform these therapies from artisan products to mass market cures?
There's no doubting that cell and gene therapies are hard to make. Autologous CAR-T therapies, for example, involve removing a blood sample from a patient, manipulating and transforming the cells, and then re-infusing back into the body.
It's an on-demand process performed by highly skilled operators handling a multitude of inputs. Treating patients in this way would've been considered pretty sci-fi just a few years ago.
I wanted to find out more about the development of the industry and how it's led us to some of the manufacturing challenges we face today. To find out, I got in touch with Matthew Durdy from the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult.
Welcome to the podcast, thanks for coming today. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your role at Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult?
Matthew: Hi, my name is Matthew Durdy. I'm the Chief Executive of the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult. I've been with the business since its inception 10 years ago. Originally came in to work on the business and strategy side of things, and then three years ago became the chief executive. So, I now work for everybody else in the organisation.
Stuart: It's a tough role being at the top. Was that your first foray into advanced therapies?
Matthew: It wasn't quite, actually. I was brought in to help set up what was then the cell therapy catapult about 10 or 11 years ago because I was already working in the space of the sort of preservation and growth of stem cells.
Stuart: So, you had an industry in there and it was a-
Matthew: There was a recognition of an incipient in industry in cell therapy. But we were right at the sort of early years of it or the early concepts of it before we got to what we've got now as an industry.
And we were pioneers basically saying, “This is going to be part of the future, but if we're going to have a future, we need the basic tools.” And at that time, there weren't even the media necessary to maintain or shelf life of cells at ambient temperatures.
Stuart: So, you say the industry has been growing over the past 11 years. Well, longer than that, but you've seen it mature even in your time at the Catapult. What's the maturity of the industry, say compared with the evolution of the biologics industry? Where are we on that line?
Matthew: I would say based on watching the industry, I think we're at proof of concept, which is a big move from where we were 10 years ago. 10 years ago, we were out in the marketplace saying, “Cell and gene therapies are coming. You should get ready for it.”
And everybody was just looking at us saying, “What? You're never going to be allowed to put those things into people. They're unknown, unpurified, and we don’t know what's going to happen.
The regulators will never let you do it. Patients probably won't let you do it. You'll never be able to manufacture them. And even if you can get through the clinical trial, nobody's ever going to pay for it.”
Well, 10 years on, we're in a very different place because cell and gene therapies are now being used routinely within hospital systems and national health services and in the United States. But I think that's just the beginning of a massive growth phase.
Stuart: So, tens of thousands of patients treated right?
Matthew: Yes. But the potential, and you asked about the comparison with biologics. The thing about biologics is, although there are many different diseases and indications that you can apply biologics to, there are essentially one modality.
Whereas with cell and gene, it is a collection of different modalities. So, you've got multiple tendons to the sort of diversification of the industry, and therefore the growth.
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Stuart: Matthew's certainly seen the cell and gene therapy industry grow from a scientific possibility into a commercial reality. But if we really want to see these products moving more towards the frontline of therapy, then we're going to need a shift in manufacturing efficiency.
Patient to patient variability means that the same process doesn't always produce the same results and even the most automated of processes can't yet account for this inherent variability.
Could a digital transformation of the industry provide the key to more effective automation? I asked Alexander Seyf from Autolomous what he thought.
Alexander: My name is Alexander Seyf and I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Autolomous, which was incepted back in February 2019. So, my background from education on physicists, then I went to the industry of telecom for decades, did management consultancy quite heavily and did some startups.
My passion is how we can bring the emerging technologies to bear when it comes to different industries and how we can benefit it from a business perspective, but ultimately from end user perspective. Always been within B2B business, but we'd always have in mind about the purpose of what we do and who we're doing it for.
When I exited my last company in 2017, my purpose was let's not just think about the financial gains and business gains, but let's make an impact in the society beyond ourselves.
How we can find something which brings more prosperity to people who we don't know and who we are not responsible for. And through that journey of couple of startups I did with my partner Alexis Blaine, I came across cell and gene therapy through Professor Mark Lowdell at UCL.
And I was just absolutely mesmerised about the creativity and the upside potential of this industry of new modality of medicine.
But also, I was really taken to see that in this day and age, back in 2018, ‘19, we still do everything on paper. We still don't harness that power of digitization and computers and everything good about it.
And if you remember about that time we were talking about distributed ledger, we were talking about IoT, AI, machine learning and everything. And these are not just attributes, they are really tool sets that they can use to greater benefit. One of these penny drops and I said, “Wow, God, when you wish for something, you get it.”
And I was just amazed about that opportunity presented itself to work together with Mark and his colleague Kwok Pang, I greatly respect both of them because they have the head in the right place, in the right shoulders and they have the right purpose.
So, how we can really make sure that we bring the technology not to make more money, but also to save people. How we can really cut the seconds, the minutes and the hours of production and add that one to life of a patient.
And I was just absolutely mesmerised, both myself and Alexis, we were like, “God, this is exactly what we want to do.” And we incepted the company. We were quite pragmatic in what we did.
So, we wanted to digitise by getting the workflow management of manufacturing. Digitise it, have a less dependency or no dependency on pen and paper and bring it to a digital form.
So, it gives you the power of extracting the knowledge that you want for the prosperity of the science, to make sure that the agility and flexibility is in the hands of the end user to make sure that the personalised medicine really depicts by itself that you can personalise that therapy for each patient.
Because ultimately, from the start material, it's blood of the patient. So, how we can really make the optimal out of that, but also be mindful that any business need to have a blood and that blood is the money.
Stuart: It's a fascinating journey. But if I can just rewind you back a little bit to where did you find the industry in say, 2018, 2019. Can you just walk us through what the process looks like?
For example, if you are doing a manufacturing run for an autologous cell therapy, what are the steps and where do you think Autolomous can make an impact?
Alexander: Absolutely. A very good question. When I started 2018, ‘19 I went to an ISCT conference back in Florence. And the state of industry was very much scientific based.
The commercialization really didn't pick up. And everybody was thinking, “How can we get more space? How can we get more troops in the ground, how we can make more and more of the same thing?”
But the reality kicks, if you want to create a scalability in a viable position or setting, you'd really need to do it very smartly. It's not just putting money into it and people into it.
And when it comes to money into it, I mean, when you want to build a facility for clean rooms, it's not just the space. You need to have electricity in place, you need to have a lot of things and a lot of boxes ticked.
And every time I used to go to conferences, we're talking about these two elements, how we could get more people, how we can get more space. Nobody was talking about how can we automate this, how we can make sure that the integrity of data is absolutely spotless.
Because it's not like mobile phones. If you drop a call, a mobile phone, is expected. What happens? Nothing. You call them again.
Here, if something goes wrong, the patient dies. So, not only you are curing a patient, but you're killing them prematurely. So, we need to be absolutely 100% sure.
And what we did was we want to minimise the error of the humans as much as possible. So, rather than you reading somebody else's script on a piece of paper and interpreted in the way that he intended, or she intended to be interpreted in the wrong way, how can we digitise this one?
Stuart: Is this still the way that it's done today? So, you say that when you were looking at manufacturing facilities, you were seeing people logging information on pieces of paper that gets put into the file and somebody else has to read that later. Is that still the state on the ground today?
Alexander: I'm really afraid to say yes. Majority of the space still they're going for manual processes. And I think definitely digitization has gone a long way. Nowadays, if I go to conference after COVID, people are talking different things.
People are talking about automation. People are talking about how we can protect the data, how we can create a providence of the processes, how we can have the power in our hand rather than just based on luck.
So, I think we have gone a long way, but still, unfortunately, a lot of processes are manual and there is a very logical sense to it because majority of these have started from academia.
In academia you do absolutely phenomenal job, but you do in a small scale, you do rare diseases, which has 10, 15 patient population a year.
Stuart: And you're writing it in your logbook as well. That's the academic way.
Alexander: Exactly. And that's what you do. But when you come to the scale, when you want to really replicate that certainty in one to thousands, to a hundred thousands, when you want to make sure that you are closer to patient, and being centralised, being decentralised, how we can really replicate the excellence from one place to many places, that requires a different tool sets, that requires a different mentality.
And also, another piece which is very important, how we can really make sure we empower the academics and scientists with the scalability by inception, and that only can be done by digitization.
How we can make sure that this phenomenal science, which is evolving in the speed of light is actually captured in the right way so we can harness that knowledge, which is immensely important.
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Stuart: It is astonishing that these so-called advanced therapies are still reliant on paper-based data entry for their manufacturer. Confusion in the batch record could easily be the difference between a patient receiving an effective cancer fighting therapy or having to start the whole process again. And these patients don't always have a long time to wait.
Digitization could help the industry by reducing the risk of human error, while also serving as an effective means of sharing insights across drug development teams. I asked Matthew what he thought about the potential of digitization in the cell and gene therapy industry.
So, we speak to Alexander Seyf on the other half of this episode, and he tells us about the importance of digitization. Is that something that you believe in as well?
Matthew: Absolutely. Alexander and his team have a fantastic product there actually. And the ability to capture that data and keep it safely and with high integrity in a way that you can then use it to translate into information that is usable, is fundamental to the future of the industry, because we need to be able to learn everything we can from what we do.
Stuart: Especially with something as complex as this, we're still learning. And if we're not even able to look back at what we've done, I think that just makes that much more difficult.
Matthew: An extra dimension to this, which is not always appreciated, is the sort of inverse effective statistics, if you like. So, much of development work in industry comes from repetition, high rates of repetition. And therefore, you are able to control down to information that tells you about effects.
Very often in the cell and gene therapy industries, the repetition rate is low, whether that's in a clinical trial where you've only got 30 patients or where you're doing one or two production runs.
So, that means you have to approach it in a different way. You have to approach these things and say, “We need to gather all of them, all of the data we can from this, because we need every single precious piece of the gold dust.”
Stuart: And people who you work with are probably thinking about what else can we measure and what other pieces of data can we glean from this process? Because it's not possible to fully paint the picture at this stage.
Matthew: No. And the other thing that we've got to be realistic about is that we're aiming to get to a point where we know was it is that matters. We're not going to be necessarily using all of this data and all of this information through our manufacturing processes through the lifetime of the product.
But we're still even now having conversations about what it takes to release a product, what it takes to optimise manufacturing processes, and where organisations like the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult come into this is that we can help companies understand and get to the point where they have the key pieces of information, and those are the things that they will use to “control” their processes going forwards.
The other thing to recognize is that a lot of times we don't know what we don't know. We've got to all work together and gather this information to get to the point where we know what matters.
Stuart: And is it possible for a company to come to you and say, “Well, what seems to be best practice in the industry?” Are you allowed to kind of be that broker in the middle?
Matthew: Obviously, we have to be extremely careful, and we are, and we're totally set up with conflict-of-interest procedures to make sure that we do not inadvertently use other people's information, other people's key information, and cross it over. And to our knowledge, we've never done that.
When we enter into an agreement for a collaboration, we are very clear and specify out front with our collaborator, which bits of information are key and the sources of competitive advantage for them, and which bits of information we can use for the general benefit of the industry.
Stuart: That seems to be a fair arrangement. It recognizes that actually there are places where you want to be competitive and places where you don't want to be competitive.
And I know a bit from your background that you had some experience in the telecommunications industry. Are there any parallels we can see between what happened with the development of that kind of competitive, non-competitive parts?
Matthew: I think there's a lesson in there that I certainly would like to see understood by the industries. If you indulge me for a moment, I'll tell you a little story about … and we're going back 30 years now.
I was as an investor, a non-executive director on a telecommunications company, and we were investing in the rollout of a network, and this was the first rollout of this network.
And three courses away through the rollout, the company management came to the directors and said, “We would like to rip out everything that we have put in into the network.” Talk about masks, switches, everything right down to the handsets.
Once we started breathing again, we said, “Why?” And they said, “Basically since we started this journey, the world's got together and signed something called the Global Standards Memorandum or GSM, and that means that the manufacturers of the equipment are all working to a common standard.
So, all the switch boxes, which are bigger source of cost are all manufactured at scale now, and the cost of those is reduced by about 75%. And if you take the cumulative effect of all of those changes, the management team basically said, “We can rip out everything that we have done and finish the rest of the job for less than doing the last quarter of the existing network.”
And that for me was a similar moment because we all now are completely accustomed to our phones.
Our phones changing all of the time, they're upgrading themselves, but we don't have to learn how to use them again, if the whole background is standardised, and that's what's led to this technology revolution with respect to telecommunications.
Stuart: So, what do you think the lesson is there for the cell and gene therapy industry?
Matthew: The lesson is to understand where the ground is for competition, and to be careful about making sure that you develop and hold onto your competitive advantage, but in all other areas, seek to reduce costs for the industry as a whole.
So, to translate that into examples, clearly elements of the product itself and the innovation itself, the therapeutic are proprietary and very, very important. But the manufacturing process may not be totally proprietary. The equipment that's used in the manufacturing may be shared.
Really quite critically, the way the products is used in the hospital system is a massive source of cost for therapeutics. It's a cost for the healthcare system that gets discounted through the health technology assessment process from the value of the product, it gets discounted from the value that the healthcare system is willing to pay for the product.
So, if the industry can get together and say, “What are the ways that we bring down the cost of use of the therapeutics?” Making sure that you don't have to train somebody for every single different therapeutic, making sure that everything is familiar, making sure that we're achieving all the economies of scale from people using the same basic design and inputs don't have to be made by the same people, but if they're done to a common design, all of these things bring down the overall cost of the industry and facilitate uptake as well.
And volume is going to be a very, very big driver of the economics of the industry going forward. So, anything that accelerates uptake, accelerates volume and brings down costs.
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Stuart: So, one of the lessons we can learn from other industries is that companies should be seeking to compete on quality, not trying to reinvent the wheel. That would mean a reduction in development and manufacturing costs, which could widen the customer base for these therapies, thereby building a larger market for everyone to participate in.
From the patient's point of view, more competition between therapy providers should mean that we end up with more effective therapies with less time spent on redeveloping training programs or delivery protocols. These are areas where more collaboration and the adoption of standards could drive down costs.
But thinking about autologous therapies in particular, how far can we standardise on the manufacturer of patient specific doses? And is there enough appetite to collaborate on manufacturing? I asked Alexander for his thoughts on how to drive more collaboration.
You talk about collaboration. Is that mindset not strong enough at the moment? Or what's holding people back from collaboration?
Alexander: Well, I think there is a vacuum of the tool sets but at the same time, there is overwhelming tool sets. So, sometimes I feel that people in the industry, they're getting a bit confused what you guys can do, opposed to others.
It's not matter of — we don't see it as competition, we don't see people competing with us, we see it as we want to compliment what is missing. It's always to better have a peace and live in a peace rather than in a war. We either want to go to the war.
So, we want to create a peaceful environment that people know what they're good at and work with other folks to compliment what they don't want to be good at, or it was a cohabited strategy.
So, we want to compliment. If that goes through partnership, so be it. If that goes through redevelop something that doesn't exist in the market, so be it. If it is to putting two people together to work stronger, so be it.
We need to think in a bigger picture. We need to work for the benefit of the industry rather than for each others in singular form.
Stuart: And what sort of ingredients do we need in that solution then? Who do you think needs to be talking to whom? How do we stimulate this? What have you found that works effectively for you?
Alexander: I think we need to pay more attention to the scientists, I would say. I mean, it's very weird because nobody knows better than you what you like in terms of the food you're eating.
Our customers are the people who are driving their science forward. We need to talk to them closely what they want. And that's one of the successful ingredients that we have in Autolomous.
We have people like Mark, people like Kwok and others who coming from the industry, who have done this before, they know exactly what it is that it needs to be in place.
So, we need to talk to those folks rather than just think about the figures and numbers and how can I make the sales more? How can I make a difference between me and others? It's not a matter of that.
We need to think about the scientists, we need to think about people who are manufacturing this and who are the scientists? What is it that they want from an objective emission perspective, from the data they are generating and collecting? What's the next step? How we can make their life easier?
How we can use the time more efficiently and ultimately how we can save more patients, how we can make this more accessible, how we can make sure that there is a coverage for these costs of therapies. And they need to be lowered down.
I mean, the latest numbers you're seeing 3.5 million patients. I mean, how many people really can afford to pay that. I'm absolutely certain we can create an economy of scale for this, and we make it viable and accessible for billions of people, because that's what it's about.
The piece that really has a high patient population and folks from a scientific perspective are working hard to solve it is a solid tumour. I mean, we are talking about millions of people, how we can make sure that these guys get into the goal as quickly as possible by helping them to get the more sense of the science to really monetize the learning. These are kind of challenges that we have.
Stuart: And I'm sure everybody in the industry shares those aims and goals. I mean, that's why most people get into cell and gene therapy because they see the potential to cure things that were considered incurable before.
But maybe if I put this to you and I’m interested to hear what your thoughts are, perhaps there's a question of approach. I can imagine some companies designing process equipment, which is more for the mass market, it's quite generic in application. Do you think that's the right way for the cell and gene market?
Alexander: I don't think so, Stuart. I mean, I'm not a scientist from an education perspective, I'm not coming from this but I'm just using my common sense. When you go to biologics and small molecules and rest of it, in one run, you get hundreds of thousands of doses or millions. And it is a well-defined process. The study material is well-defined. There's no variability in it. You qualify it for once, you produce it for many times.
Here we are talking about patient material, which the starting point is patient's blood. So, you need to really have in mind that there's a variability in one process of manufacturing to other and there's uncertainty.
So, how we can minimise that uncertainty and empower the scientists to do a better job each time, on and on, and again, so the quality replicates a million times, but the process might alter.
So, I think we need to have a different dimension, different mindset. So, we need to have, as depicted by the name more personalised approach to manufacturing rather than a mass market. We need to scale it out, we cannot scale it up.
Stuart: Of course. Well, there's no use producing a hundred doses worth from a single patient's blood. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How far do you think we need to go on the instrumentation side? There seems to be a little bit of a gap there.
Alexander: Absolutely. And once again, I'm mentioning cellular origin quite a few times.
Stuart: Yeah, we appreciate that. We appreciate that on the TTP Podcast.
Alexander: I know, but I'm not biassed. What I'm biassed to, and I had raise my hand for it, is because you guys have one of the few who has pragmatic approach, let's not reinvent and let's not go for revolution. Revolution is destructive. We need to go evolutionary step.
So, let's automate and make a robotics of one element of it. If you go to big part of it. A lot of folks that go for big revolutionary part and change the world, great idea. But we are talking about pharma, we are talking about biotech, a conservative by inception, and we need to be conservative because ultimately, we are talking about life of people.
So, the tech transfer, we are talking about folks who have been using the same instrument, same thing for many, many years, for decades. I mean, the cell and gene therapy has been run for a while.
So, how can you convince them to really subtract what they have for decades, and they put the whole career and life in it and change with the new box, I mean, this doesn't make sense. So, the thing that cellular origin is doing, I think I really cannot embrace it enough, is the right approach.
Let's automate one piece before we go to second. Let's do a baby step with the gigantic leap in terms of impact, and that's a piece that we need to do. We are not in rush, at the same time, we want to do it as quickly as possible to save more people, but we can’t do it in rush.
Stuart: No, I think it's you don't want to run before you can walk. You're not trying to fundamentally change too much in the process when you are talking about a cellular origin or any kind of integration system.
The risk with trying to change anything too dramatically is that you've got to revalidate everything. It is a big effort to get over that hurdle for those companies. So, at least maybe just replicating or improving parts of the process is a good place to start.
And actually, with the added benefit then that you get more controllability and more traceability. And actually, with the digitization, you then get the chance to learn from the material that you've gathered, just from running the process. It can only be a good thing.
Alexander: Exactly. I mean, touching upon the tech transfer, imagine you've gone through clinker tries, you've gone through all this, you've got your commercialization, you're getting close to it, and you've used a certain setting to get there. Suddenly, somebody comes in and says, “Look, change it to mine. You can get it much better.”
I mean, do I want to really take that risk? But if I come and say, “I will change that piece to do better,” so I need to just validate one part of it rather than the whole system of it. It's much easier to talk to folks and they can really get a grasp of this. That's what we need to do.
We need to be very pragmatic in our approach. We need to be very realistic with our approach, and we need to be adamant about what we bring in as that small step which can bring the walking towards the running.
Stuart: It seems that — bear with me on this analogy. If somebody like Autolomous is providing network infrastructure, you then allow people to have a single handset and change mobile phone provider.
So, I can go from EE to Vodafone very, very easily. And it should be the same then in cell therapy manufacturer. If you want to or have to change your unit operation, you can do, but you're not then having to learn a whole new limbs connection or scripting or whatever.
Alexander: It's exactly the same. We need to be giving that freedom to the end users to have the agility to choose what they want to use, how they want to manufacture it, if they want to do it by themselves, if they want to do by CDMO, CMO, if they want to use this equipment rather than the others.
I believe that having the pragmatic approach to really help them to realise that they have that choice to alter the settings, to make the choice in general, it's very important.
Look, I don't want to go politically controversial, but in the UK and countries like, we take freedom for granted. I mean, of course I have the freedom. Of course, I can choose whatever I want to do whatever I want within limit obviously, before the cops come to my door. But a lot of countries, they do not have that choice.
Stuart: It's like a free market economics really, isn't it?
Alexander: Absolutely. Basically, yes. So, we need to tell these guys that you do have the choice. You don't need to go to revolution to gain your freedom and act on your freedom.
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Stuart: As Alexander mentioned, it's not that easy to have interoperability between competitor products or interconnectivity between different unit operations. For therapy developers, it's actually an illusion of choice, and it's this lack of flexibility that contributes towards manufacturing inefficiencies.
I asked Matthew for some final thoughts on how we might overcome some of the remaining roadblocks in the industry and how this could help governments to more widely deploy cell and gene therapies.
So, what are you most hopeful for in the future? I think you said we have a good future. What's kind of your ultimate aspiration? You look back in 10, 15 years and think this is a job well done.
Matthew: I think it's encompassed in the vision of the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, which is that we want to see a thriving industry in the UK but also globally, that is delivering advanced therapies across the world. And in order for that to happen, we need all of the components to work. We still need a flow of new therapeutics.
I was reading about something, about a treatment in Parkinson's disease the other day, which I didn't imagine would work as well as it looks like it does five years ago. So, I think we're going to have all of these new therapeutics coming through and then we need to work out how we deliver those therapeutics to a global population.
So, to answer your question, in 10 years’ time, I would like to see patients across the world, not just in the highly developed economies benefiting from cell and gene therapy, because there's a thriving industry that is delivering those therapeutics to them.
Stuart: And there's some interesting indications that you could go after as well in some of the developing countries, which there'll be higher level of diabetics, for example. And some of the diabetes therapies might have some really good impact there.
Matthew: So, the discussion about the potential of the cell and gene therapy industry (to use a UK-centric phrase), to level up healthcare inequalities, I think is a really pertinent one.
I was listening to a representative of patients for sickle cell disease in the UK and it is a massively underserved area of disease and a huge burden on the healthcare system as well as being quite awful for the patients.
And if we were able to bring through therapeutics that were working in the UK context, we'll be able to write some of those inequalities.
Stuart: As a development opportunity for those countries because your population, they’re healthier. It's going to be fascinating to see the impact of these therapies because you're right, there's an enormous amount of promise.
Matthew: To use one of our plug words, one of our values, it's about collaboration. It's about everybody coming together and recognizing all of the things that we need to do to realise this. And if we do that, then we really will be seeing the benefits of it.
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Stuart: We're incredibly fortunate that thanks to advances in cell and gene therapy, we're actually on the brink of eradicating some of the most life impacting chronic diseases. There are concerns that these technologies in their infancy of therapeutic modality might prove economically out of reach for a large proportion of the global population.
There's clearly a strong need to increase manufacturing efficiency to address indications with higher prevalence. And we're seeing the role that data and automation platforms could play in unlocking innovation and cementing best practice across the industry.
Therapy developers would also benefit from more consumer choice at the process development stage. And so, we'd like to see a higher degree of standardisation in the equipment space to allow for more transferrable protocols. Learnings from other industries like telecommunications, point the way to how this could be implemented.
As we heard today, great progress has been made both scientifically and commercially to bring these therapies to patients. And with the right approach, there is still a scope to bring cell and gene therapies to the mass market.
That's all for today. Thanks so much for joining us and a huge thanks to both Matthew and Alexander for sharing their expertise on this episode.