Brian Culley, MS, on Sharing Knowledge From the Development of Spinal Cord Injury Cell Therapy
The chief executive officer of Lineage Cell Therapeutics discussed findings related to its cell therapy OPC1 that the company presented at the first Annual SCI Investor Symposium.
“I think 1 of the things that is really important is for all of the companies, researchers, and academics to always keep in mind what is important to the patient. I think 1 of the challenges in a lot of different conditions can be that what matters to the patient might not be what the companies are working on. You really have to keep aligned with what's important to the patient—measure what's important to the patient—and then use that as your mission. Let them be the lead. If your therapeutic is solving a problem that they don't have—I’m not sure why you're doing that. We really have to always have good continuity among the regulatory bodies, the patients, their caregivers, the physicians, and then of course, the companies that are working on those new therapies.”
Lineage Cell Therapeutics’ OPC1 is an investigational cell therapy product consisting of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) that is intended to treat patients with spinal cord injuries (SCIs). OPC1 has been evaluated in a phase 1/2a clinical trial (NCT02302157) that treated 5 patients with thoracic injuries and 25 patients with cervical injuries. During the course of the clinical development of OPC1, Lineage Cell Therapeutics has investigated improvements to the manufacturing and delivery processes used for the cell therapy. Some of the company’s findings were recently presented at the first Annual SCI Investor Symposium, held June 29, 2023, in San Diego, California, by Brian Culley, MS, the chief executive officer of Lineage Cell Therapeutics. The SCI Investor Symposium was created by Lineage and the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation with the intention of sharing knowledge among experts in the SCI space in order to advance the development of new treatments.
In an interview with CGTLive™, Culley discussed history of OPC1’s development, future plans for its evaluation, and how the company’s participation in the SCI Investor Symposium may help advance the development of other new treatments for SCI. He spoke about improvements in manufacturing and delivery that Lineage has been working on with regard to OPC1, noting efforts to bring the manufacturing to a scale that is commercially viable and to simplify the method for delivering the cells to the spinal cord. Culley also discussed challenges in the SCI therapeutic research landscape, noting that the condition is rare and a limited number of individuals with SCIs are able to participate in clinical trials for new therapeutics. He concluded by emphasizing the importance of keeping in mind what kinds of impacts from therapeutics matter from the patient perspective.
