Non-profit, open-licence lentiviral vectors and producer cell lines for CAR-T
The engineered virus that delivers the CAR gene costs tens of thousands of dollars per patient and is controlled by a few suppliers. A non-profit supplier with open licences would cut that cost sharply.
Vector is often the single largest material cost in autologous CAR-T and a frequent cause of manufacturing delay; capacity is concentrated among a few contract suppliers and licences are restrictive. Caring Cross and several academic centres have shown that non-profit vector production can supply clinical programmes at a fraction of the cost. The proposal is a foundation-funded vector consortium with stable producer cell lines, a shared plasmid bank for common CARs (CD19, BCMA, CD22) under open licences for non-commercial and low-income-country use, and GMP production at cost.
- Manufacturing cost and time for living and radioactive medicines · Cell therapies take weeks to make for one patient and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isotopes run short.
- Most of the world has almost no cancer care · Seven in ten cancer deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries, where radiotherapy, pathology, surgery and drugs are scarce.