David Barrett, JD, on ASGCT’s Q3 2024 Landscape Report
The chief executive officer of ASGCT discussed the latest trends in the field of cell and gene therapy.
“What we are seeing now is a continuation of the robust pipeline that we've been witnessing for the past several years. Despite some fluctuations in overall market performance, what remains is the steady drumbeat of cell therapies and gene therapies moving through the clinical pipeline. I think we will continue to see that trend for quite some time into the future.”
The field of cell and gene therapy is still relatively new in medicine, only gaining a major foothold in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Throughout this time, and up until the present, this therapeutic area has rapidly evolved, with new FDA approvals of products, the introduction of new modalities, the initiation of hundreds of new clinical trials, the launch of startup biotech companies, the financial/investment climate, and other factors all shaping the landscape. In order to help capture and analyze these shifts, the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) puts out its quarterly “Gene, Cell, & RNA Therapy Landscape Report”. In addition to traditional gene therapies and genetically modified cell therapies like chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies, the Landscape Report also covers unengineered cell therapies, gene editing therapies, RNA therapies, and RNA vaccines.
Following the publication of the Landscape Report for the third quarter of 2024, CGTLive® reached out to David Barrett, JD, the chief executive officer of ASGCT, to get his insight on the key takeaways from this latest Report. Barrett went over the contents of the report and highlighted the main points of interest. In particular, he drew attention to the FDA’s approval of Adaptimmune Therapeutics’ afamitresgene autoleucel (afami-cel, marketed as Tecelra), an investigational T-cell receptor T-cell therapy, for the treatment of synovial sarcoma; the increasing proportion of nononcology cell and gene therapy products in development; and the continued steady growth of the field.
