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Thermo Fisher Launches Medium to Support Cell, Gene Therapy
The Gibco CTS NK-Xpander Medium is the first medium to support the expansion of NK cells for cell and gene therapy applications.
Thermo Fisher Scientific recently launched a GMP-manufactured cell culture medium that supports the large-scale growth and culture of functional natural killer (NK) cells for cell and gene therapies.
Gibco Cell Therapy Systems (CTS) NK-Xpander Medium is the first medium to support the expansion of NK cells for cell and gene therapy applications. Raw material traceability and regulatory documentation support the system.
“Cell therapy developers are increasingly turning to NK cells because they do not elicit the kinds of active immune responses that trigger conditions such as graft versus host disease,” Mark Powers, vice president of research and development at Thermo Fisher Scientific, said in the announcement.
“With NK-Xpander Medium, manufacturers can reach the necessary scale they need for NK cell therapies while minimizing regulatory burden and risk,” Powers continued.
NK cells grown in NK-Xpander Medium show a more substantial rate of expansion when compared to NK cells grown in other media. These cells demonstrate cell killing in vitro and in vivo models, making them suited for developing allogeneic cell therapies.
Allogenic cell therapies come from healthy donor tissue. They are more conducive to cost-effective scale-up of cell therapy manufacturing than autologous therapies produced using a patient’s own cells.
NK-Xpander Medium is part of Thermo Fisher Scientific’s CTS product line, a portfolio of GMP-manufactured products backed by regulatory documentation and designed to work synergistically, a Thermo Fisher Scientific spokesperson explained.
Specifically, the products work synergistically from cell isolation/ activation to gene transfer and cell expansion to address cell therapy developers’ manufacturing workflow needs.
Overall, NK cell therapies hold promising applications in treating solid tumors.
“To capitalize on the promise of these therapies, our lab used human NK cells grown in Gibco CTS NK-Xpander Medium to study their impact on solid tumor-derived cancer cells. The NK cells cultured in NK-Xpander Medium displayed robust and potent cancer cell killing activity,” said Richard Eckert, professor and chairman at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
