Cellcor's new approach to immunotherapy links patient and lab; the firm's success is tied to skirting the FDA bottleneck
BOSTON--What do you get when you cross research with clinical care? The answer, immunologist Michael Osband says emphatically, is a new industry--"biocare." His Boston-based company, Cellcor Therapies Inc., is one of about a half-dozen firms worldwide that are developing therapies tailor-made in the laboratory for individual patients.

It's been eight years since Michael Osband, then a professor at Boston University, started down the road to biocare. He was experimenting with in vitro immunization of human lymphocytes: taking out white blood cells, sensitizing them to a particular antigen, then putting them back into the body, where their enhanced properties could be put to use. He discovered that lymphocytes, once removed from the body, could be treated in ways that would be harmful in the body, but not to cells in a petri...

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