Research Team from Wesley Center for Immunotherapy at UH Seidman Cancer Center Awarded Top Scoring Abstract Award at the 2025 International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy Annual Meeting

CLEVELAND, Ohio – A research team from the Wesley Center for Immunotherapy at UH Seidman Cancer Center was awarded the top scoring abstract award at the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy Annual Meeting.

David Wald, MD, PhD from UH Seidman Cancer Center, and his colleagues, were selected for their abstract "Development and Clinical Validation of a Less Than One Day CAR T-cell Therapy Manufacturing Process".

While CAR-T cell therapy has demonstrated enormous potential to improve the outcomes of patients with B cell malignancies and multiple myeloma, the therapy has poor accessibility due to enormous costs and slow, complex manufacturing that typically takes 1-2 weeks. The development of an ultra-fast and highly scalable manufacturing platform has the potential to transform the field and enable much wider utilization of this therapy. To date, 15 lymphoma patients have been treated with CAR-T product generated from this platform in a clinical trial based at UH that is led by Dr. Changchun Deng with the vast majority achieving complete remissions. Importantly current results also support that the manufacturing approach can generate CAR-T products that exhibit a significantly more favorable toxicity profile as compared to traditional CAR-T products.

The abstract “Efficient Cost-Effective Manufacture of a Non-Viral Transposon Based Novel BAFF CAR T for treatment of B-cell Cancers” was also accepted at the conference happening in May.

The second abstract at the International Society for Cellular Therapy highlights a method for efficient cost-effective manufacture of a non-viral based novel BAFF-CART for treatment of Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma.  BAFF CAR is an alternate therapy to treat patients who are refractory to standard CART cells and is utilized in early phase trials conducted at UH Seidman Cancer Center.

The cellular therapies were manufactured in the onsite cellular therapy facility, located at the Wesley Center for Immunotherapy at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center. Through this and the shared cellular therapy facility with Case Western Reserve University, the nation’s only National Center for Regenerative Medicine, UH has manufactured more than 700 cellular therapy products for patients on clinical trials at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center and throughout the nation over the last two decades.

In addition, David Wald, MD, PhD, was named to the 2025 class of Senior Members for the National Academy of Inventors.