JERUSALEM – Gamida Cell announced today the publication of an article that evaluates carlecortemcel-l, the generic name of what is known widely as “StemEx,” a therapy for blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. The article, Carlecortemcel-l, an ex vivo expanded umbilical cord blood cell allogeneic transplantation for graft, written by Dr. Ka Wah Chan and Dr. Demetrios Petropoulos, published in the November 2009 issue of Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy. It is available online at (Dr. Chan is the Director of programs of hematology / oncology and blood and transplant of bone marrow stem cells at the Texas Transplant Institute on the campus of Methodist Children’s Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. It is also the study’s principal investigator ExCell, which is currently evaluating StemEx.
Dr. Petropoulos is pediatric oncologist hematologist at the Children’s Cancer Hospital at MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas at Houston, Texas, where he conducted the Phase I study of StemEx. In his article, Dr. Chan and Dr. Petropoulos stated that “previous results suggested that the infusion of carlecortemcel-l … could be related to favorable mortality rates not related to relapse ….
The ex vivo expansion of umbilical cord blood cells (UCB, for its acronym in English) seems to be a logical approach to increase the availability of this source for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSC, for its acronym in English). Research carried out in laboratories showed that the essential for success is to enhance HSC proliferation without promoting differentiation.