Speaker
Description
Human mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) are a therapeutically relevant, heterogenous cell entity with immunomodulatory and pro-regenerative potentials. Apparently, MSCs mediate a huge proportion of their therapeutic effects via extracellular vesicles (EVs). Connected to several advantages in using cell-free products for the therapeutic setting, MSC-EVs emerged as promising novel therapeutic agent for various diseases, including graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), ischemic stroke, COVID-19 and sepsis.
It is our current mission to optimize the MSC-EV production strategy in a scaled, GMP compliant manner, and to set up an appropriate quality control platform to translate MSC-EVs into the clinics. One of the challenging aspects in this context is inherited from the MSC field, i.e. contradictory reports on the efficacy of MSC therapies. Apparently, not all MSC products mediate therapeutic effects when applied into patients. Similarly, we observe functional differences among independent MSC-EV preparations; even when same MSC stocks were used as starting material. Thus, to avoid draw backs as they occurred in the MSC field by failing to show efficacy in a phase III clinical trial for GvHD treatment, it is one of our most important missions to address the heterogeneity aspect by establishing appropriate read outs and set up strategies for allowing scaled and reproducible manufacturing of potent MSC-EV products.
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