Somatic Gene and Engineered Cell Therapies: Workshop Participants

A workshop, guided by the Expert Panel on Somatic Gene and Engineered Cell Therapies, was held on November 26, 2019 in Toronto. Workshop participants had backgrounds in ethics; commercialization of therapies; healthcare policy, economics, and innovation; and gene and engineered cell therapy sciences. They considered key challenges specific to the approval and use of somatic gene and engineered cell therapies in Canada, identified challenges related to affordability and accessibility of these therapies, and explored promising approaches to overcoming these challenges.

The results of the workshop will help to inform the Panel’s report, expected to be released in fall 2020.

Workshop Participants:

Patrick Bedford, Senior Manager, Regulatory Affairs, Celgene Inc. (Mississauga, ON)

Sacha Bhatia, Chief Medical Officer, Women’s College Hospital (Toronto, ON)

R. Jean Cadigan, Associate Professor of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC)

Brent Fraser, Vice-President, Pharmaceutical Reviews, Canadian Agency For Drugs And Technologies In Health (Toronto, ON)

Matthew Herder, FRSC, Director, Health Law Institute; Associate Professor, Faculties of Medicine and Law, Dalhousie University (Halifax, NS)

Lana Janes, Venture Partner, adMare BioInnovations (Vancouver, BC)

Erika Kleiderman, Academic Associate, Centre of Genomics and Policy, McGill University (Montréal, QC)

Larry Lynd, FCAHS, Associate Dean, Research, and Professor and Director, Collaboration for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC)

Deborah Marshall, Professor, University of Calgary (Calgary, AB)

Denis-Claude Roy, Research Director, Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux de l’Est-de-l’Île-de-Montréal (CUISSS-EMTL) (Montréal, QC)

Fabien Touzot, Associate Professor, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) Sainte-Justine (Montréal, QC)