September 6, 2000
UW establishes special lab for gene and cell therapy
The University of Washington School of Medicine is opening a state-of-the-art laboratory to explore the cutting edge of medicine’s future: gene and cell therapy.
The Gene and Cell Therapy Core Laboratory is the only lab of its kind at a Northwest educational institution. The laboratory becomes the newest part of the University of Washington’s General Clinical Research Center, which was established in 1960 to provide an environment for clinical research and to promote interaction among faculty members from various disciplines.
The center occupies a remodeled ward in UW Medical Center and will hold an open house on Sept. 8. Besides the 2,600-square-foot laboratory, the center has rooms with nine beds and six chairs for patients.
“The laboratory expands our capability to perform innovative patient-oriented research across a wide range of disciplines,” said Dr. John Brunzell, the center’s director and UW professor of medicine. The laboratory’s grand opening will also be Sept. 8. Scientists will receive tours of the lab; this is almost certainly the last time it will be so easy to tour it. Afterward, workers will scour and sanitize all nooks and crannies of the lab, and scientists will have to follow intensive “clean lab” procedures in order to enter it. Technicians will scrub up and then put on special protective suits before entering the lab. They will have to make sure supplies were ordered in advance, because supplies are held in a quarantine area before they can enter the lab.
If a lab technician has to leave the lab for any reason, he or she will have to remove the protective suit before leaving the lab, and then have to don new gear and go through the original procedures to enter the lab again.
Cell and gene therapy involves removing cells from a patient’s body, expanding their number, sometimes inserting genes, and then returning the mix as a treatment into the patient. That’s why the lab has to be so clean.
“We will be making things in the lab that will be going back into patients’ bodies,” Brunzell said.
Many researchers will benefit from the new lab. For example, being able to expand the number of cells from a patient is important to the work of Dr. Phil Greenberg, UW professor of medicine and immunology, and colleagues, who are looking for ways to battle HIV and AIDS. They remove immune system cells from patients who are HIV positive. The cells are then grown in the laboratory into billions of cells to dramatically increase the number of cytotoxic, or killer, T cells (CTLs) that are part of a normal immune system. The goal of the study is to provide patients with this infusion of cells to prevent infection. The patients then return to the center for frequent blood tests to determine how the reinjected T cells are doing.
“The facility is incredibly important to us. One of the most difficult steps in translational cancer research is moving a therapeutic strategy from your own lab into human clinical use in a structured and safe manner, ” said Dr. Mary L. Disis, a University of Washington associate professor of medicine and an affiliate investigator in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Clinical Research Division. “This facility not only provides us a laboratory in which to produce human therapies, the center provides us the expertise of scientists and regulatory specialists who know how to monitor novel treatments. Without a doubt, having this facility at the University of Washington will greatly speed up the testing of state-of-the-art cancer treatments.”
A proposed treatment protocol must first be approved by the UW human subjects’ committee; then it must be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; and then the Clinical Research Center’s scientific advisory committee. Use of the lab requires another layer of approval. Scientists who wish to use the lab must provide staff with special training. Each lab technician provided by the scientist is paired with a technician from the research center itself. They work in pairs. One performs the lab tasks, while the other carefully fills out the documents that must be kept scrupulously in this kind of research.
The lab includes several pieces of state-of-the-art equipment, including centrifuges that can spin 100,000 revolutions per minute. There is also a sophisticated filtering system that cleans the air that goes in and out of the lab.
Gene therapy is only part of the Clinical Research Center’s operations. Major areas of research include the progression of atherosclerosis; diabetes; diagnosis and treatment of lipid disorders; infertility in males; effect of diet and exercise in aging; antibiotic treatment of patients with cystic fibrosis; multidrug and biological response modifier therapy of hepatitis B and C.; diagnosis and treatment of infertility; pathogenesis of hypertension in pregnancy; treatment of central nervous system tumors; and hormonal rhythms in aging and psychiatric disorders.
The center is involved in about 115 studies and has about 6,000 individual visits a year, with about 1,000 patient stays. That number will increase because of the new space and increased funding, Brunzell said. The redesigned space at UW Medical Center effectively doubles the center’s capacity.
The lab, whose construction cost was $3 million, was funded in part by the National Center for Research Resources, one of the National Institutes of Health.
