The Workshop on Clinical Translation is now sold out. The development of cellular therapies is a complex process and as more therapies advance to clinical trials and beyond, the field matures and refinements to the process are made. This includes pre-clinical modeling, regulatory steps, and the trials themselves. This year's program follows the process of navigating toward and through clinical trials in three sessions:. A renowned panel of speakers will cover a range of topics from pre-clinical modeling to ongoing clinical trials. For attendees who are driving, they can park in Parking Lot 1, 2 or 4.
Organoid-induced differentiation of conventional T cells from human pluripotent stem cells
Gay Crooks, MBBS - UCLA Orthopaedic Surgery, Los Angeles & Santa Monica, CA
A study by UCLA researchers is the first to demonstrate a technique for coaxing pluripotent stem cells -- which can give rise to every cell type in the body and which can be grown indefinitely in the lab -- into becoming mature T cells capable of killing tumor cells. The technique uses structures called artificial thymic organoids, which work by mimicking the environment of the thymus, the organ in which T cells develop from blood stem cells. T cells are cells of the immune system that fight infections, but also have the potential to eliminate cancer cells. The ability to create them from self-renewing pluripotent stem cells using the UCLA technique could lead to new approaches to cancer immunotherapy and could spur further research on T cell therapies for viral infections such as HIV, and autoimmune diseases. Among the technique's most promising aspects is that it can be combined with gene editing approaches to create a virtually unlimited supply of T cells able to be used across large numbers of patients, without the need to use a patient's own T cells. The study, which was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell , was led by senior author Dr.
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Author Contributions: Conceptualization: A. C; Supervision: G. The ability to generate T cells from self-renewing pluripotent stem cells PSC has the potential to transform the current practice of autologous T cell immunotherapy into universal off-the-shelf products.