Sant Pau redoubles its commitment to personalized and precision medicine. The hospital has laid the first stone of what will be its new Advanced Therapies Unit, focused on the development of immunotherapy drugs known as CAR-T against various types of blood cancer. With the forecast that it will become operational within a year, the center will go from having 39 square meters dedicated to this activity to having 163 square meters.
The new facilities, which will require an investment of 5.5 million euros over four years, are consolidated as a strategic resource for the Sant Pau campus, as they allow the development and manufacture of personalized biological drugs within the hospital center for the treatment of its patients. Sant Pau is one of the few hospitals worldwide that are authorized to produce this type of immunotherapy drugs, and the new facilities reaffirm it as an international reference center in this field.
The Advanced Therapies Unit will have four advanced therapy drug manufacturing rooms —known as clean rooms— and will allow centralizing the entire development process within the hospital. Thus, the new unit will not only multiply Sant Pau's productive capacity, but will also allow it to conduct clinical trials in all its phases.
The new facilities, of the Sant Pau Research Institute (IR Sant Pau), will be built with the support of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute and the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Foundation, which has contributed 4.5 million to the project. The new unit has also had the support of the Banc de Sang i Teixits, which offers its professional experience and also the manufacturing capacity of advanced therapy drugs.
"This new infrastructure places us at the forefront of research in this field and will help us advance more quickly towards more effective and personalized treatments for our patients and continue contributing to the advancement of scientific knowledge," highlighted the director of IR Sant Pau, Jordi Surrallés. In addition, the infrastructure aims to provide service not only to other research centers at the state level, but also "opens the door to establishing international collaborations," added Surrallés in an event with the minister Manel Balcells; the hospital director, Adrià Comella; the president of the Delegated Commission of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, Evarist Feliu, and the director of the Oncological Hematology and Transplant Research Group at IR Sant Pau, Javier Briones.
The new facilities will boost the work of research groups already working on the development of new advanced therapies. Until now, Sant Pau researchers have developed two academic CAR-T drugs. In addition, the new unit will make it possible to open other lines of research oriented towards pathologies that have no cure through advanced techniques, and which allow for the development of personalized and precision medicine. As Briones highlighted, "there are very few centers worldwide that produce their own CAR-T," as it requires "technology, capacity, experience, and facilities" that Sant Pau will have, consolidating itself as a global benchmark.