A Conference Season’s Greeting

It is the holiday season! But many in the industry will be preoccupied with full schedules rather than full stockings, with an abundance of conferences in the weeks leading up to year-end. Over the last few months, I’ve attended various cell and gene therapy talks and roundtable discussions to glean an overview of the current state of the field. 

At the Cell and Gene Therapy Manufacturing conference in Twickenham, UK, there were several interesting case studies demonstrating how processes can be effectively scaled out – from late-stage solid tumor clinical trials to lentiviral vectors. Pernille Linnert Jensen from Novo Nordisk also offered an example of how to transition from large molecule (antibodies in this case) to stem cell manufacturing. For Pernille, training and education was crucial to the endeavor. 

The challenges raised in 2018’s cell and gene therapy supplement (namely, manufacturing, standardization, logistics, and pricing) remained a central theme in Twickenham, and were also a hot topic of discussion at this year’s Pharma Integrates conference in London. However, I got the sense that strong progress is being made and optimism pervades. For example, advanced medicines were frequently compared with the early days of the monoclonal antibody (mAb) field – one delegate asked me to consider the myriad challenges overcome by the mAb industry to grow to its current size.

But, excuse my humbug, the difficulty of finding and retaining staff arose in many talks. Matthew Cobb of Miltenyi Biotech, for example, said that this could be a major pinch point for the industry over the next two years. A recent report from the UK’s Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult (1) supports this claim. They found that of the 70 UK companies in the field that they surveyed, 83 percent were concerned that recruitment and/or retention of skilled individuals will be an issue for growth (1). 

Nevertheless, I’m pleased to report good tidings for the cell and gene therapy field! The skills shortage is arguably another “good” problem to have – the natural result of the industry’s meteoric rise and a training base that is struggling to maintain pace.
 

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