The future industry represents an important direction of a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, and is the most active leading force for the development of new quality productive forces. In Weihai Tianzhi Research Institute, a biotechnology company called Hamike aims at life sciences and is building a "cell arsenal" in a "no man's land" at the forefront of the future.
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Qi Baiqiu, the person in charge of the Hamike project: What kind of medicine does it dare to sell for 1.2 million yuan with one injection? It is an anti-cancer drug that uses CAR-T cell therapy. It is currently the only anti-cancer drug in the world that is recognized as being able to completely cure cancer! As tricky as it sounds, it's not actually an "IQ tax." We are now developing this equipment, which is to greatly reduce its production cost and strive to "knock it down" from the sky-high price!
Car-T 细胞 来者何"人"?
Qi Baiqiu: Let me give you a science popularization, this is a cutting-edge technology involving the field of cell and genetic engineering, and it belongs to the future industry. To put it simply, in the case of leukemia, instead of waiting for a long and painful donation of the right match, the patient uses its own immune T cells to fight its own cancerous tumor. This is called "giving back to the other in the way of the other", isn't this set of operations cool? That's what we are developing with our CAR-T cell preparation equipment.
Defeat magic with magic
Qi Baiqiu: In fact, our human body produces a lot of cancer cells every day, and the reason why there is no outbreak of cancer is because we have strong T cells in our body, which eliminate the cancer cells. But the reason why cancer breaks out is because some of the cancer cells disguise themselves, it fools our body, and the T cells don't recognize them. The fully automated equipment that we have developed at this stage and will develop in the future is equivalent to a cell "arsenal", extracting our own immune T cells and then "blasting" them.
Burst T cells!
Qi Baiqiu: "Explosive reform" is to superimpose 1,000% combat effectiveness on T cells through our genetic engineering technology. We implant a fragment of RNA into the T cell, so that it can go from an ordinary warrior who does not recognize cancer cells to an immune warrior who can accurately recognize strikes. But of course, in such a tough battle, only one cell is definitely not enough, generally speaking, billions or even tens of billions of immune cells are needed, but the patient has progressed to this disease, and it actually does not have the ability to proliferate this kind of cells, so what should I do? We proliferate in vitro. After 6276 proliferates in vitro, we can have a "cell army" that can fight tough battles, and after this army is transfused back into the human body, it can multiply spontaneously in the blood environment, giving cancer cells a devastating blow.
Life-saving devices
Qi Baiqiu: Then again, what does our equipment have to do with sky-high prices? It's a big deal. At present, all of our domestic gene drug preparation equipment has been monopolized by foreign countries and relies on imports. As a result, our clinical trials, as well as clinical applications, all have to rely on people's breath.
Everyone is unwilling, this is a life-saving device. Only by making it ourselves can we bring this price down and give patients more hope to live. But our team is really good, and our chief scientist is Academician Sun Lining, academician of the Russian Academy of Engineering,... The team also has 5 doctoral supervisors and 3 master's supervisors. In order to be able to make the equipment, one of us is 40 years old, and I went to study for a doctorate.
Several "brushes" on the body
Qi Baiqiu: We have invested a lot of energy in original research, and have done a lot of technical research and accumulation. At present, our first stage of cell sorting equipment has been made, and its sorting efficiency has been able to catch up with the equipment of foreigners, and even catch up with it a little bit. What does it mean that it is now able to achieve a sorting efficiency of 98%? That is, we have been able to extract 98 of the 100 T cells in our patients' cells, which means that our patients have a better chance of survival.
Our ultimate goal is to develop a fully automated CAR-T cell preparation system. How automatic? It is to put the patient's peripheral blood on the device, and after a preparation cycle is over, the patient's "tailor-made" CAR-T drug can be directly output. We estimate that after the device is launched by the end of 2026, it will at least reduce the price of CAR-T drugs from 1.2 million to 600,000. At present, we are already on the road to the second phase of research and development....
Our long-cherished wish is to do our best to make CAR-T drugs available to all cancer patients, so that they can live with quality and dignity.
Producer丨Jiang Cheng
Reporter丨Jiang Cheng and Wang Panpan
Editor-in-Charge | Wang Jiaxin