Last month, the streets of New Orleans — typically known for jazz riffs, brass bands and colorful parades — buzzed with a different kind of energy. Thousands of cell and gene therapy stakeholders, among them, researchers, biotech leaders, technology providers, students and patient advocates, descended upon the Big Easy for ISCT 2025 and the ASGCT Annual Meeting.
Against a backdrop of historic charm, bold visions for the future of medicine were exchanged as attendees from all over the globe showed up in force to learn, present, collaborate and reconnect on all aspects of cell and gene therapies.
During his ISCT 2025 welcome address, ISCT president Miguel Forte invoked the most famous law of futurist writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” A good reminder that cell and gene therapies are accomplishing feats that, just a few decades ago, would have sounded like science fiction.
We asked industry thought leaders to share their takeaways from the two events. Here are some key themes, with longer insights offered via the links below.
- AAV is far from obsolete and continues to provide meaningful utility as a well-characterized delivery vehicle
- While LNPs are not replacing AAVs, they are emerging as a strong alternative and competitor in the field of gene delivery
- The manufacturing cost, complexity, and cold chain make LNPs well suited for global reach, but there are still hurdles to overcome in order to truly globalize access to non-viral gene therapies
- Sophisticated editing technologies and mature delivery platforms are finally converging in the clinic
- CRISPR has become a standard tool applied across a wide range of therapeutic contexts — for example, CRISPR-edited CAR-T therapies
- In vivo CAR-T is finally moving to the clinic — in vivo cell therapies have the potential to democratize cell therapy access by bypassing the complexity and costs associated with ex vivo cell production
- The progress being made using CAR-T cells to treat autoimmune disease is real, and cause for optimism
- Centralized manufacturing still has its place, but decentralized approaches are gaining momentum in cell and gene therapy
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