ABOVE: The cryopreservation facility at Cell Vault partner lab Brooks Life Sciences in New Jersey
CELL VAULT
A new cryopreservation bank offers customers the chance to stash away their T cells for use in future cancer treatments. Using a similar model to cord blood banks, the startup Cell Vault announced that it has already raised $1 million from Silicon Valley investors in an initial round of funding. The field of T cell–based cancer therapies has rapidly blossomed in recent years, but at this point, scientists doubt the utility of stowing healthy T cells in a freezer, just in case.
Cell Vault proposes that, once frozen, customers’ T cells can be readily available for adoptive cell transfer, an emerging form of cancer treatment. One treatment of this kind equips T cells with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR), which enable the cells to seek out and destroy specific tumor types bearing complementary antigens.
The ...
