26 Nov 2011
By: GRACE CHUA
THERE can be a yawning gulf between the petri dish and the patient, where new scientific breakthroughs take many years to come into clinical use.
Now, the Health Sciences Authority’s (HSA) cell therapy facility is starting to fill that gap, running clinical trials and starting collaborations.
Set up in 2006, the then-50 sq m facility expanded to 350 sq m in 2009 at a cost of $9 million.
Today, it grows different types of human cells for treatments, and looks for the best techniques and conditions to grow them.
Cell therapy refers to putting new cells into a tissue to treat a disease.
For example, the facility collects and isolates a special type of immune cell from a leukaemia patient’s own blood, grows more of those cells and then delivers them back to the patient to boost his immune function.
This is safer and less aggressive than a bone marrow transplant, because the immune cells in donor marrow can attack a patient’s healthy cells.
If donated blood is used for cell therapy, the HSA lab can pick out certain types of cells from the donor’s blood, encouraging these “good” cells to grow and weeding out those that attack the patient’s own body.
Cell therapy is an accepted treatment that has been in clinical trials around the world for illnesses such as leukaemia and lymphoma, and must be differentiated from unproven remedies such as “anti-ageing” skin potions containing animal stem cells.
Recently, the facility in Outram finished a clinical trial with Singapore General Hospital to find out how well cell therapies worked for relapsed leukaemia patients, or those who did not respond to other treatments.
“We found that cell therapy alone is insufficient to control disease, but as an additional treatment modality, it can decrease disease bulk and remissions,” said Dr Mickey Koh, the facility’s medical director.
He added that researchers hope cell therapy could be a routine option here for treating certain types of cancer in the near future – hopefully in the next few years, he said.
Now, the cell therapy facility is branching out into collaborations with the National Heart Centre Singapore to grow heart cells for new treatments and the Singapore Cord Blood Bank to grow cord blood stem cells. The latter could be used like bone marrow to treat cancer patients, with fewer immune side effects.
“What we want to be is to be a resource for basic research groups in Singapore who want to see their work finally ending up in patients,” Dr Koh said, adding that clinical trials for heart cells and cord blood cells would begin early next year.
For example, National Heart Centre researchers managed to make human skin cells turn back into stem cells that can then be coaxed into becoming heart cells.
The cell therapy lab, in turn, aims to carry out the process in bulk and ensure the quality and viability of the resulting heart cells.
Other groups doing research here include the Singapore Stem Cell Consortium, which comprises scientists from various institutes and hospitals.
But cell therapies are expensive because of the time and expertise needed to prepare them for each patient: It can take up to two months to grow enough cells for leukaemia treatments.
For example, a prostate cancer therapy approved by the US Food and Drug Administration costs more than US$90,000 (S$118,000) for a three-dose course.
All the cell therapies that have been given to patients here so far are part of clinical trials. If cell therapy becomes a routine treatment option in the long run, who will bear the cost?
“That’s hotly debated,” said Dr Koh. But some cancer drugs do not come cheap either, he pointed out.
Cancer patients can use Medisave to cover part of their radiotherapy and chemotherapy costs, but there has been no discussion yet of whether it could cover cell therapy in future.
So far, the HSA facility is the only cell therapy facility operating here.
But pharmaceutical and health-care firm Lonza has begun work on a $40 million cell therapy plant here, expected to be completed in 2013, and has said the market for cell therapies could double in the next five years.
Email: caiwj@sph.com.sg
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