Advanced Therapies Seminar – Dendritic cell therapy for rheumatoid arthritis: The journey from concept to clinical trial
10/01/2024 12:00 pm to 10/01/2024 1:00 pm
Event Details
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Catharien Hilkens is a Professor of Immunotherapy at Newcastle University. She obtained her PhD in Immunology at the University of Amsterdam. She then won an EMBO long-term fellowship award to work at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, before joining Newcastle University to start her own research group. During her PhD and post-doctoral work, she became intrigued by the central role that dendritic cells play in orchestrating immune responses, and she became interested in exploring their therapeutic potential. At Newcastle, with invaluable support from a strong translational environment, she developed a therapeutic tolerogenic dendritic cell product that was tested in one of the first clinical trials of its kind in rheumatoid and inflammatory arthritis patients.
Professor Hilkens is one of the founders of the European network Action to Focus and Accelerate Cell-based Tolerance-inducing Therapies (AFACTT – 2014-2019). She is a management committee member of the Arthritis Research UK Rheumatoid Arthritis Pathogenesis Centre of Excellence (RACE; 2013 – present).
In this session she will describe the journey of developing a tolerogenic dendritic cell therapy from pre-clinical work in human and mouse models to producing an investigational Advanced Therapies Medicinal Product (ATMP) for clinical trial.