VCU Medical Center Holds Cellular Therapeutics Lab Open House

By Malorie Burkett

Virginia Commonwealth University today dedicated the Cellular Therapeutics Lab for the VCU Massey Cancer Center’s Bone Marrow Transplant Program.

The new facility will provide a Food and Drug Administration-compliant area to expand the current cellular therapeutics clinical enterprise to perform procedures more specifically tailored to individual cancer patients’ needs as opposed to broadly supporting intensive, high-dose chemotherapy treatments used in bone marrow transplantation.

Cellular therapeutics is where specific cellular elements of the patient’s or donor’s immune system are isolated or adapted to work as a focused therapy for cancer or immune-mediated disorders, providing new hope for patients with a myriad of diseases. 

“This laboratory will allow us to take our existing adult stem cells from sources such as blood, bone marrow and umbilical cord blood and use them to their maximum potential, both in transplantation cancer therapy and immune therapy,” said John McCarty, M.D., professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and director of VCU’s Bone Marrow Transplant Program.

Located in the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park, the $1.8 million, 5,000-square-foot expanded laboratory will include a main clinical lab for actual stem cell processing and three smaller GMP laboratories behind a special air lock for advanced cell therapy preparation. In addition, the expansion will allow for conference space and office areas.

The new space will allow transplant physicians to speed up their stem cell collection processes, making it safer and more efficient, and will enable them to work with twice as many cell samples at one time than in their previous space, a necessity given the growth of the transplantation program.

McCarty said the new lab also will provide an environment that extends beyond clinical work and serve as a tool to bring promising preclinical work to patients and foster the development of novel techniques and protocols by incorporating the efforts of clinicians and researchers at VCU and Massey Cancer Center.

“To have the integrated clinical research and integrated applied basic research in one place is a benefit for promoting translation of new discoveries into cutting edge clinical practice,” said Gordon Ginder, M.D., director of the VCU Massey Cancer Center. “Bringing researchers together from various disciplines is one of the things we do best, and this leads to acceleration of the process of bringing new biomedical discoveries to the bedside to benefit patients.”

According to McCarty, another objective of the new lab is to reach potential investigators in other disciplines at VCU to collaborate and explore other diseases that could be treated using cellular therapeutics.

The work performed in the lab will encompass treatments beyond those specific to oncology because cellular therapy may also be applied to patients in non-cancer disciplines, and many of the advances in transplantation have come from work in non-cancer disciplines.

“This laboratory is a physical reflection of the potential of the ongoing partnership of the university, the hospital, the cancer center and of the referring physicians that we work with who put their patients in our trust in working to solve the cancer problem,” said McCarty. “This state of the art laboratory is really a resource that many transplant programs do not have.”

For more information or to get involved with the Bone Marrow Transplantation Program, research, contact Cathy Roberts, Ph.D. at 804-828-1292.