Irish company teams up with General Electric on new leukaemia treatment

Cork company Zenith Technology is working on "revolutionary" cell therapy innovation with its US partner General Electric.

“It is going to change the face of medicine because it’s personalised medicine in the truest sense,” says founder and executive chairman Brendan O’Regan. “You are harvesting good cells from the body, you are growing them remotely from the body and then re-injecting them into the body.”

The project with GE's subsidiary, GE Healthcare Life Sciences Holding AB, uses software developed by Zenith to run and manage a particular form of cell therapy called CAR-T Cell Therapy that is helping hospitals treat patients with leukaemia.

“Hospitals are genetically engineering patient’s own T-Cells to make them smarter and tougher at seeking out and destroying cancers such as leukaemia. It all starts when a patient’s blood is filtered through a machine that separates T-Cells and other white cells from the rest.

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“The selected T-Cells are mixed with a virus that has been disabled so it does not cause illness. Instead, it carries genetic instructions to the T-Cells to grow an artificial receptor called a Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) that will track its target cancer and kill it.”

As one cancer cell dies, the CAR-T Cells, which are customised to zero in on a patient’s specific type of cancer move on to the next cancer cell, multiplying in the patient’s blood until they are no longer needed, said O’Regan.

Similar technologies are being used to look at arresting and reversing the effects of ageing, O’Regan says.

The technology sounds like the stuff of science fiction and it is a far cry from Zenith's genesis when O'Regan, an instrument physics graduate from Cork Institute of Technology, set up the business as two-person operation in a spare room in his house in Carrigaline in 1998.

O’Regan, who had left CIT 20 years earlier, had worked for a number of years in the pharma sector and the experience has stood to him as he built up Zenith to the point where it now employs more than 800 people in nine countries.

He credits the success of the company to the experience Zenith gained dealing with multinational pharma companies based in Cork and elsewhere in Ireland. As it developed and delivered technological solutions locally, the corporate pharma companies began deploying them globally.

Working with companies such as Pfizer, Novartis, GSK and Johnson & Johnson, Zenith came to the attention of General Electric. Zenith's name kept cropping up as the company that was helping to deliver integrated technological solutions.

GE was anxious to try and integrate its equipment and Zenith’s technology into what they called a flexible manufacturing platform or FlexFactory.

“About four years ago GE came to us. We had the technology that they wanted.”

The US giant wanted to be able to call on Zenith to do things as a priority for it. GE offered to buy out the Irish owners, “but I said we would prefer a significant minority shareholding to see how things go. So they took a 30 per cent shareholding.”

Flex Factory

While developing the software to help GE provide its innovative cell therapy solutions is at the cutting edge of Zenith’s relationship with GE, the bulk of its work for the global giant is still in providing FlexFactory solutions.

“If you are a pharma company and you discover some new drug in your lab, you go down the traditional route of going to a contract manufacturing organisation. But producing enough material for clinical trials and subsequent scaling up by building large scale factories, takes time and money.

* “The investment levels can be anywhere between €400 million and €1 billion depending on the scale: GE Healthcare’s KUBio, a prefabricated factory-in-a-box for producing biopharmaceuticals, which is based on the FlexFactory concept, is ready to run in 18 months.

"KUBio facilities are between 25 and 50 per cent more cost-effective to build than comparable traditional facilities and they come with a whole suite of equipment supported by our software."

* This article was edited on November 2nd.