The ISSCR Provides Comments on FNIH’s Accelerating Medicines Partnership Cell-Based Therapy Initiative
On 25 September 2023, the ISSCR submitted comments in response to the Foundation for National Institutes of Health’s (FNIH) Request for Information on Cell-Based Therapies for use in developing an Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) Cell-Based Therapy Consortium. The AMP program’s purpose is to bring together public, private, and nonprofit stakeholders to work towards a common goal of accelerating new and effective therapies to patients. To advance this objective for cell-based therapies, the ISSCR submitted comments that identified four areas of focus for a potential AMP to strengthen the translational and clinical pipeline: creating a bank of clinical PSC cell lines, reducing genomic heterogeneity, developing safe, hypoimmune therapies, and developing in vitro alternatives to animal models. Successfully developing strategies to solve or mitigate these issues will reduce costs and speed up the timeline for delivering cell-based therapies to patients.