Backed by collaboration, non-profit Caring Cross is putting cost and accessibility front and center while tackling HIV with CAR T.
When the founders of Caring Cross share what their nonprofit is working on and why, it’s clear the organization is aptly named. The team’s extensive cell therapy knowledge and decades of combined experience in industry and academia are coming together to advance therapeutics, but it’s a shared passion for helping people that drives everything they do.
“While it’s important to create great technologies, we also have to think about how to distribute treatments to make them affordable for everyone around the world,” says Boro Dropulić, PhD, MBA, Caring Cross co-founder and executive director. Caring Cross co-founder, Rimas Orentas, PhD, adds, “We have to dedicate the necessary resources to make curative therapies available.”
Working to meet the global need for accessible, effective HIV treatments
It's not surprising that an organization focused on improving medication access and affordability is working to cure HIV. There are currently over 38 million people living with HIV globally, many who are in low-income countries and lack the resources to pay for costly treatments. While antiretroviral therapies have greatly improved the prognosis of a patient with HIV, side effects, adherence issues, and drug resistance can make controlling the virus over time a challenge.
For their HIV Cure Project, the team at Caring Cross is bringing compassion, science, collaboration, and innovation together to develop effective HIV treatments at a reasonable cost.
Developing a new type of CAR T to treat HIV
Orentas remembers when CAR T cell therapy first came onto the scene and dramatically changed the outlook for certain blood cancers. “I was in the Pediatric Oncology Branch at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) when the first four kids were treated for leukemia with CAR T cells,” he shares. “The clinical response was so rapid, you knew within weeks that these patients had crested some therapeutic threshold we had never seen before.”
Inspired to build on this success, Caring Cross has developed its Anti-HIV DuoCAR-T cell therapy that acts in two ways to fight HIV — one receptor actively targets and eliminates HIV-infected cells while the other protects cells from infection. Results from animal studies were extremely promising and, as of October 2022, a Phase 1/2a clinical trial is underway.
Reducing costs with innovative cell therapy and viral vector workflows
Caring Cross is laser focused on reducing the cost of medications, and one way they are working to do this is by shortening CAR T manufacturing time. Dropulić explains, “Currently the time to manufacture a CAR T product is 14 days. When you use 14 days of media, 14 days’ worth of people, 14 days’ worth of devices occupied, that really drives up the cost. Imagine producing the therapy in a day or two — that would really lower costs.”
In parallel, the Caring Cross team is working on new, more cost-effective ways to develop viral vectors, which are key to CAR T cell therapy production and also very expensive.
Striving for place-of-care manufacturing
Once costs are lowered and manufacturing time is shortened, Caring Cross sees place-of-care manufacturing as a logical next step for increasing access to autologous CAR T cell therapies. If hospitals and providers were to gain the ability to produce their own therapies onsite, it would eliminate the time, cost, and risk associated with transporting cells to a centralized production facility and then back to the patient.
Sharing technology to spur industry advancement
Caring Cross plans to play an active role in driving place-of-care manufacturing through innovation and transparency. “The only way to truly democratize these technologies throughout the entire world is to remain committed to open data and open access,” says Dropulić. “We’re focused on building a process that can be published and made available so hospitals can make their own CAR T cells.”
Caring Cross is also developing and will make public a small-scale process that will allow anyone with access to a GMP facility to make their own vector. “Drug developers don’t want to wait 18 to 24 months to get the small batch of vector they need to validate their candidate in the clinic,” Dropulić explains.
Collaborating to overcome complex hurdles
The team at Caring Cross knows that the fastest way to bring cures to patients is together, with a common goal to — as Dropulić so simply puts it — “do well and do good”. He continues, “When we collaborate, it’s important that there’s an understanding, a commitment to thinking about underserved populations.”
At Cytiva, we share the belief that therapeutic innovation should benefit everyone. By offering our technologies and solutions to Caring Cross, we’re happy to play a small part in helping to deliver curative medicines to all people in need around the world. “Cytiva has many of the tools required to bring down drug costs and streamline the processes,” says Orentas. “We’re really excited that Cytiva shares in our vision and understands how best to integrate the different pieces of the workflow so we can do really transformative things for the patient.”
To learn more about the technologies organizations like Caring Cross are using to efficiently develop, scale, and distribute CAR T therapies, visit our cell processing webpage.