Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products | Cell Therapy | Corning

Dr. Guillaume Churlaud and his team produce cell and gene therapies, such as mesenchymal stromal cells, Treg lymphocytes, CAR-T cells, NK cells, and other ATMPs. All ATMPs produced in the MEARY Center are for phase 1 and 2 clinical trials. They produce new cells and new gene therapy drugs to treat patients suffering from autoimmune, hematological, and cardiac diseases, and so much more.

MEARY Center is the Paris University Hospitals Consortium’s core facility for cell and gene therapy. It is dedicated to the manufacturing of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) for the 39 leading university hospitals belonging to AP-HP (www.centremeary.aphp.fr). Located at the heart of Paris within Saint-Louis Hospital, it is embedded in an ecosystem connecting patients, research, and therapeutic innovation. The MEARY Center is accessible to diverse collaborators such as academic, biotech, and pharma companies.

Dr. Guillaume Churlaud, Senior Quality Control, Meary Institute at Saint-Louis Hospital, Paris, France, is the pharmacist in charge of the quality control laboratory within the Meary Center. He has been trained in the field on biotherapies in Paris hospitals, and has completed his training in the Clinical Investigation Center for Biotherapies at the Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. He has more than ten years of experience in the development and quality control of hematopoietic stem cells and advanced therapy medicinal products. He also holds a Ph.D. in immunology, and has a strong expertise in basic and translational research in cell and gene therapy.

Watch the video of the interview with Dr. Guillaume Churlaud or read the transcript below. 

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How do you intend to impact patients' lives as a scientist?

Our team in Meary produces cell and gene therapies, such as mesenchymal stromal cells, Treg lymphocytes, CAR-T cells, NK cells, and more other ATMPs. All ATMPs produced in the Meary Center are for phase 1 and 2 clinical trials. Our job is to produce new cells and new gene therapy drugs to treat patients suffering from different diseases such as autoimmune diseases, hematological diseases, cardiac diseases, and so much more.

What is your lab’s goal using personalized medicine?

We are doing personalized medicine because in some cases we are treating the patient with its own cells. We take the cells of the patient; we modify the cells and then we reinject these cells to the same patient in order to cure disease. For instance, we use autologous T cells to produce CAR-T cells, and then reinject these cells to the patient to treat its leukemia.

For what applications do you use Corning products?

We use Corning products in many of our manufacturing processes. For example, we use Corning products for manufacturing of mesenchymal stroma cells. We use these cells in 2 of our clinical trials. The first one was STROMA-CoV2 clinical trial coordinated by Professor Anoine Monsel at Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. We use mesenchymal stem cells to treat COVID-19 acute respiratory distress syndrome. We also use mesenchymal stem cells to treat traumatic brain injury.

This clinical trial was coordinated by Professor Vincent Degos, and in these two projects we use Corning products to isolate and expand mesenchymal stromal cells.

What Corning technologies do you use and in which stages of your processes?

To produce mesenchymal stem cells, the first step is to isolate these cells from the umbilical cord. We isolate these cells using Corning® CellSTACK® 1-layer vessels. We expend these cells, and then we harvest these cells using CellSTACK filling accessories, and then we centrifuge these cells using Falcon® or 500 mL Corning® tubes. After this step of harvesting, we re-expand the cells using CellSTACK 10-layers. So we have done an amplification of these cells using Corning HYPERStack® 12- to 36-layer vessels, and then we harvested the cells.

Where do you see the challenges and opportunities for your research in the future?

We are looking for an improvement of our manufacturing processes in order to lower the cost of the ATMP production. We need to find the right cost, the tool for small batches, for example autologous ATMPs, but we also need to find the right tools for huge batches, such as we need in allogeneic ATMPs. We need also to find tools for closed manufacturing systems, and we need to have a GMP compliant medium for the different cell types at the right price, including the medium and also the cytokines.