Personalized medicine offers the opportunity to create treatments for patients based on their specific needs. However, one of the major issues with personalized medicine is the cost of goods (COGs), and the healthcare industry is continuously looking for new strategies to address this challenge and help make customized healthcare more readily available to patients that need it.
Our CEO, Patricio Massera was recently interviewed by Pharma's Almanac on this topic, for their Jan. 2022 experts Roundtable on Advances in Personalized Medicine.
In his interview, he admits that personalized medicine has higher costs than traditional approaches, but despite these hurdles, innovations and the great advances accomplished in the recent years with cell and gene therapy could hold promising results for creating a more affordable type of personalized care, one above all: Allogeneic therapies.
Here is how he feels these treatments can provide new hope for affordable personalized care:
"While cell therapies offer new opportunities for personalized medicine that we haven’t seen before, autologous-based treatments are expensive to produce and harder for patients to afford. They involve complex processes with short hold times and geographical limitations. These factors create economic issues for developers, medical providers, and, of course, the patients in need, limiting the impact these personalized treatments can have today.
Research shows that a similar type of cell therapy-based personalized medicine — allogeneic treatments — holds the potential for quicker, more efficacious, and more accessible therapies that meet a patient’s individual needs. Allogeneic therapies offer an economically feasible approach to cell therapy–based personalized medicine. These treatments are simpler to produce because they do not rely on the logistical challenges of getting cells from the patient to the processing facilities. Furthermore, they offer a standardized and cost-effective approach, which makes creating larger batches more feasible and reduces the risk of contamination.
These factors make this treatment type easier to implement than its autologous alternative, creating an opportunity to offer cell therapies for personalized care on a larger, global scale. With enhancements to our global facilities and capabilities, AGC Biologics is prepared to meet the increasing demand for both autologous and allogeneic therapies and to help find the best ways to produce affordable cell therapy treatments.
Further, with recent investments in a new cell and gene therapy facility in Longmont, Colorado, we have untapped resources to bring these more personalized and economical life-changing treatments to market."