Boro Dropulić, Executive Director of Caring Cross and CEO of Vector BioMed, explains the rationale behind Caring Cross' pioneering efforts to make CAR-T cell therapies more affordable. Drawing on his decades of experience in the field of cellular gene therapy, Dropulić shares how Caring Cross' decentralised production model lowers costs and provides access to life-saving treatments, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
Welcome and introduction by Vice Rector Michaela Fritz and Prof. Christoph Huber.
Boro Dropulić
Boro Dropulić received his PhD from the University of Western Australia and his MBA from the Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He has been in the gene therapy field since the late 1980s.
After a Fogarty Fellowship at the NIH, he joined the faculty at JHU where he worked on developing Lentiviral vectors as delivery systems for gene therapy. After 4 years in academia, he founded his first company ViRxSys and led the team that first demonstrated the safety of Lentiviral vectors in humans with his UPenn colleagues. Later he founded Lentigen, which first developed the Lentiviral vector used to produce Kymriah®, the first FDA-approved gene therapy product.
Later, Boro saw an opportunity to integrate Lentiviral vector technology with closed-system automated cell processing devices to enable distributive place-of-care manufacturing at hospitals, potentially improving the affordability and accessibility of gene therapy products like CAR-T cells. He therefore spearheaded the acquisition of Lentigen by Miltenyi Biotec in 2014 and led the development of a global place-of-care network of clinical centers that were able to successfully manufacture CAR-T cell products and demonstrate their therapeutic benefits in clinical trials.
Seeing a need for improved business models to support the affordability and accessibility of gene therapy products, Boro co-founded Caring Cross a 501 (c)(3) non-profit and serves as the Executive Director. He also is the CEO of Vector BioMed, a public benefit corporation that was spun-out of Caring Cross to provide affordable GMP Lentiviral vector manufacturing services to the gene therapy scientific community.
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