Former chief medical officer Tony Holohan has been appointed chair of the strategic advisory board of Irish cell therapy company aCGT Vector.
Dr Holohan, who retired from the Department of Health in July, joins the company along with Dr Aine Adams, formerly of Takeda's cell therapy division, who has been appointed head of cell therapy (manufacturing, science and technology).
"Tony is one of the outstanding and most respected public health professionals in Europe and we are delighted that he will head up our strategic advisory board where he will build and lead a team of leading healthcare, scientific and business professionals," said Gary McAuslan, CEO of aCGT Vector.
aCGT Vector is developing a network of cell therapy deployment pods within cancer hospitals, including St James's Hospital as its first operational facility.
The pods are self-contained units that can be dropped in or driven on to a hospital campus, and each of which brings miniaturised, right-sized pharma-grade CAR-T Therapy processing into or close to hospitals.
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CAR-T therapy is a personalised precision cell therapy that has been used to treat 15,000 cancer patients globally to date. It is predicted the treatment will be used on two million patients per year by 2025 as a mainstream treatment for certain cancers.
Approximately 50 Irish patients have received CAR-T therapy, with the first 30 having to travel abroad and the remaining 20 being treated at St James's.
Bone marrow transplants were the original cell therapy, and the HSE spent €8.2m between 2019 and 2020 sending Irish patients to the UK for CAR-T therapy.
About 20-25 patients in Ireland are expected to benefit from its availability in Ireland this year, with the possibility that hundreds of Irish patients can benefit by 2030.
It is a logistically complex process that can take up to a six weeks, requiring patients T cells to be collected at St James's, frozen in a cryo laboratory and sent oversees by air to centralised CAR-T manufacturing plants.
The cells are re-engineered into CAR-T cells over a 14-21 day period to allow them to target specifically cancer cells before they are frozen, shipped back to St James's, thawed and infused back into the patent.
Dr Holohan commented: "aCGT Vector has the potential to transform patient access to cutting edge innovations in Cell Therapy in the fight against cancer and other rare diseases.
"I’m delighted to work with Gary and his team to help create and lead an advisory board that strategically supports the business in the coming years.”
aCGT was founded by McAuslan and Ivan Coulter in 2020, and the Drogheda company was a beneficiary of the €10.5m grant awarded by the government to the Haled Consortium to bring pharma standardisation for cancer cell therapies, knowns at GMP, to St James's last year.
Holohan was also appointed to a board position at Enfer Medical in recent weeks.
Photo (l-r): Gary McAuslan, Aine Adams and Tony Holohan.
