| Meet the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Jacques Galipeau Professor of Oncology School of Medicine & Public Health |
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Research area The Program for Advanced Cell Therapy (PACT) was launched in September 2016 as a partnership program between the UW School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH) and UW Health with a vision for becoming the national leader in health care integrated personalized cell therapies for improving clinical outcomes in children and adults.
What excites you about your work?
“We’re working with a new class of technologies, living therapeutics, with use cases in cancer therapeutics and autoimmune diseases, which is very exciting. We’ve shown that we can take an idea from the whiteboard to getting a federal license to initiate the first human clinical trials to de-risk these platforms and impact human outcomes. The idea of making a difference is my motivation; that’s what makes it fun.”
What do you hope to achieve?
“Living therapeutics is a distinctive pharmaceutical category. Academic health care centers can actually manufacture cells for trials, so this is an area of drug development where we have agency at the discovery stage and the first clinical trials in humans. The logistics of living therapeutics are unique: The patient has to come in, do a blood or tissue biopsy and have cells manufactured to treat their condition that are administered via tissue or IV. I believe that accredited academic health care centers should be the places that deploy these technologies, and that’s the next big, bold idea I’d like to push forward.”
Jacques is an internationally recognized expert in translational development of cellular pharmaceuticals who has experience with clinical trials. I’m excited about his advances in personalized cell therapies.
– Andy DeTienne, WARF, Director of Licensing
Want to learn more?
Andy DeTienne, [email protected], 608.960.9857