Lund Model Aims to Accelerate Patient Access to Cell and Gene Therapies
Lund University and Skåne University Hospital have developed a collaborative model to accelerate cell and gene therapy delivery by integrating academia, healthcare, and innovation from the start. The approach includes the Cell and Gene Therapy Navigator, a tool to track technical, clinical, and commercial progress simultaneously, aiming to prevent promising therapies from being lost in the translational gap.
Researchers and clinicians in Lund have presented a new collaborative model that aims to shorten lead times and reduce costs for cell and gene therapies, with the goal of giving more patients access to potentially curative treatments. The model, described in the journal Molecular Therapy Methods & Clinical Development, is designed to bridge the translational gap that causes many promising therapies to fail before reaching patients.
Cell and gene therapies have shown promising results in conditions ranging from cancer to neurological diseases, but the path from academic breakthrough to established healthcare is long and fraught. The core of the Lund model is that the university, hospital and innovation stakeholders work in parallel and in an integrated way from the start, rather than step by step. A key change is involving the hospital early in development and production, recognizing that healthcare is not just the end user but also part of the production chain for these advanced treatments.
"It's a paradigm shift in which the hospital not only receives or tests a finished product, but also all those involved – academia, hospital and innovation stakeholders – need in different ways to participate throughout the development process, manufacturing and quality control," said the research director at Skåne University Hospital.
A practical tool developed alongside the model is the Cell and Gene Therapy Navigator, which simultaneously tracks a project's technical, clinical and commercial maturity to identify imbalances and future bottlenecks early. "It's not enough to be the first to test the therapy on humans. If we want the therapies to reach many patients we must think about production, regulations and reimbursement right from the start," said the head of the ATMP Centre at Skåne University Hospital.
The researchers believe the model could serve as a template for other regions in Sweden and internationally, though each region would need to build its own local cooperation set-up. Their hope is that fewer promising therapies will stall in the lab and more patients will gain access to treatments that currently never materialize.