Editorial: Cell Therapy Market
Cori Gorman, PhD, MBA
DNA Gateway International, LLC
www.dnagateway.com
The development of commercial cell therapies is alive and well and
presents a growing opportunity for many companies within biotechnology.
The current worldwide market is estimated to be $3.4 billion. Over 250
companies are involve in some aspect of cell therapy with 6 of these with
greater than $50 million in sales or expenditures in 2008 and 39 with
between $10 and 50 million in sales or expenditures in 2008 . Commercial
products generated over $1.5 billion in sales in 2007 based on sales from
the 68 companies with products on the market. But this market is now
growing to includes the not only the companies developing the therapies
but also companies that support the industry. Lonza, for example, is
spending $26 M to expand capacity at its facility in US as the regulatory
progress made with Osiris’ Prochymal looks set to kick start the era of
cell therapies. And innovation will be key to the success of broadening
the range of commercial cell therapies. For example, Artelis is currently
adapting the innovative cell factory, iCELLis™ to provide Cardio3
Biosciences with a complete production system. In another example,
Selexis SA has developed technology that allows stable prolonged
expression of transgenes in adult stem cells.
While current efforts are most advanced in Australia, Europe and the US,
Asia, Israel and South America have growing cell therapies sectors in
their pharma /biotechnology industries. Regenerative medicine
applications in CNS, bone and skin continue to expand with bone and skin
having a combined estimate of over $800 million in sales in 2007.
Cardiovascular applications continue to grow as approximately 50% of
ongoing studies are in this area. Cancer remains an active area for cell
therapies but other areas are also present growing opportunities in cell
therapy. The coming year will bring light to techniques for enhancing cell
function (allogeneic, currently 63% of market and autologous, currently
37% of market), improving tissue receptivity to cell delivery and
facilitating the performance catheter-based procedures.
There are increasing signs of partnering among large Pharma as well.
AstraZeneca for instance, has joined EpiStem to study how a physiological
link between hair follicles and intestinal stem cells can be used to
assess the side effects of certain cancer drugs. Recently Roche’s
Global Alliance Director, Dr. Alain Vertes, highlighted the Roche’s
growing interest cell therapy by acknowledging that cells are not just
transplants, cells can also be drugs. GSK is actively perusing
opportunities to use cell therapy for the treatment of Parkinson disease
and in late 2008 Osiris and Genzyme entered into$1.38 billion stem cell
collaboration.
