Part procedure, part drug: Robert Ang joins Siddhartha Mukherjee in pioneering a new type of cell engineering
In a recent chronicle on the promise and price of cell therapies, Siddhartha Mukherjee — author, oncologist and Columbia professor among his other titles — mused about how engineered T cells had blurred the traditional boundaries separating a procedure and a drug. “Procedures come alive in the tinkering, fussing hands of their operators,” he observed, while a “drug, in contrast, is a depersonalized entity.” For the new generation of meticulously manufactured CAR-T to reach the masses, innovators must marry the iterative nature of a procedure with the production efficiency of a drug — and add a ruthless pursuit of the leanest, cheapest process possible.
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