The Zandstra and Levings research groups are excited to receive matching funds from Health Research BC to support our Immunoengineering Strategic Initiative from Genome BC. This funding will support our vision to incorporate cell-based immunotherapies into British Columbia’s pandemic response preparedness.
This project is led by Dr. Peter Zandstra, director of the School of Biomedical Engineering at UBC, and Dr. Megan Levings, Investigator and Lead, Childhood Diseases Theme, BC Children’s Hospital. We are pleased to collaborate with Amgen, BioCanRx, Breakthrough T1D, CCRM, and CIHR on this exciting study.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need to complement vaccine development with cell therapies. For the clinically extremely vulnerable (~200,000 people in BC), the risk of viral infection is a daily reality. Among people living with a transplant, mortality approached 20% early in the pandemic, and many (>50%) are unable to mount good antibody responses even after receiving two-dose vaccination. Other immune suppressed individuals and older adults also have poor vaccine responses. Poor viral control can also trigger new diseases, such as long COVID, multiple sclerosis, and Lupus, all characterized by inflammation and tissue damage.
Our vision is to harness advances in stem cell biology, genome engineering, and biomanufacturing to produce modular immune cell therapies that can be delivered quickly anywhere in Canada. Such “off-the-shelf” cell therapies will: 1) have immediate applications for immune-compromised people and those at-risk of, or experiencing, severe infection-related complications; and 2) be poised to be rapidly pivoted to pandemic response.