Clinical success of adoptive cell therapy with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells for treating hematological malignancies has revolutionized the field of cellular immunotherapy. However, critical to the success of CAR-engineered immune effector cell therapies will be the industrialization----converting the technologies into universal and cost-effective therapies for a large number of patients. Autologous CAR-T cell therapy faces two major obstacles: cell availability and high manufacturing cost, which makes it difficult for most patients. Donor-based CAR-T cells circumvent some of the above challenges, but still face the problem of graft versus host disease caused by allogenic T cells. Natural killer (NK) cell is a specialized immune effector cell type that recognizes and kills targets without human leukocyte antigen (HLA) restriction and prior sensitization. CAR-NK cells do not cause graft versus host disease (GvHD) and can be obtained from unrelated donors as well as pluripotent stem cells (PSC), representing an ideal off-the-shelf therapeutics for all patients. HebeCell has developed a robust proprietary scalable 3D-platform technology for PSC expansion and feeder-free NK cell differentiation with superior scalability and consistency compared to traditional approaches. As gene editing and CAR-engineering can be performed in PSCs, the establishment of master PSC-CAR cell bank targeting indication-specific antigens will provide inexhaustible cell sources for the manufacture of truly off-the-shelf and cost-effective CAR-NK cells for all patients of cancer, infectious and autoimmune diseases.The establishment of our proprietary 3D PSC-CAR-NK platform allows scalable, reproducible and efficient production of homogenous functional CAR-NK cells, which can be rapidly deployed worldwide for all patients.
Shi-Jiang (John) Lu, PhD, MPH, is currently the President and CEO of HebeCell Corporation, focusing on the development and clinical translation of regenerative medicine and cell therapy technologies, especially iPS-CAR-NK cells for the treatment of cancer, autoimmune and viral infectious diseases. Before establishing HebeCell, he was the Senior Director of Research at Advanced Cell Technology/Ocata Therapeutics, which was acquired by Astellas Pharma in 2016. John is an expert in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine with 20 years of experiences. He has been conducting translational research and discovery of novel therapeutic strategies utilizing human pluripotent stem cells (PSC) and their derivatives. The goal of his research is to generate human PSC-derived products for the treatment of human diseases. He also has extensive experience in process development and large-scale production of human PSC derivatives under defined conditions for clinical trials. John is the inventor of more than 20 patents in stem cell field: in an analysis of global stem cell patent landscape by Nature Biotechnology in 2014, John’s patent application and citation ranked No. 7 and No. 5, respectively. In addition to stem cell research, Dr. Lu also has more than 10 years of experiences in cancer research. John received his BS degree in Biochemistry from Wuhan University, MSc degree in Oncology/Pathophysiology from Peking Union Medical College, MPH degree in Molecular Toxicology/Environmental Sciences from Columbia University and PhD degree in Molecular Cancer Biology from University of Toronto.
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