Improving Bone Marrow Transplant With Omidubicel

“We deploy what's called NAM technology, nicotinamide, to our cell culture, so that when we add the growth factors to enhance the number of cells, we retain the properties of those cells, namely the function and potency, but make much larger numbers of the cells. So, we can get a 50-to-100-fold expansion of a cell with a specific phenotype.”

A promising avenue of treatment in hematological malignancies is gene and cell therapy, although there is still much work to be done in improving safety and efficacy for patients. One company exploring these avenues is Gamida Cell, whose investigational agent omidubicel (NiCord) is currently being evaluated for these diseases as an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant solution.

Earlier this year at the Virtual 47th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation, results from the phase 3 study (NCT02730299) of omidubicel showed that the treatment was associated with a significantly improved median time to neutrophil engraftment compared with standard umbilical cord blood transplantation in patients with high-risk hematologic malignancies.

GeneTherapyLive spoke with Julian Adams, PhD, chief executive officer, Gamida Cell, to learn more about the company and its approach to cell therapy. He also discussed the potential of omidubicel as an alternative to bone marrow transplant in leukemias and lymphomas.

REFERENCE

Sanz GF, Stiff PJ, Cutler CS, et al. Results of a phase III randomized, multicenter study comparing omidubicel with standard umbilical cord blood transplantation (UCBT) in patients with high-risk hematologic malignancies following myeloablation. Presented at: 47th Annual Meeting of the EBMT; March 14-17, 2021; Virtual. Abstract GS2-7.