Israel’s Sheba Hospital To Use Pods To Grow Cancer-Killing Cells

This article was first published by The Times of Israel and is re-posted with permission.

The Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer will collaborate with Switzerland’s Lonza Group to develop gene therapies for leukemia and lymphoma in a faster and cheaper way.

The hospital said it will use Lonza’s new Cocoon manufacturing platform to produce genetically engineered human CAR-T cells to treat critically ill oncology patients. This is the first time the platform is being used by a hospital, said Professor Dror Harats, deputy director for research and development and director for clinical trials at Sheba Medical Center in a phone interview.

CAR-T cell therapy is an immunotherapy developed at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science that genetically modifies the patients’ own T cells — a type of a white cell — to hunt down and kill cancer cells.

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