Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Bill Williams is the President and CEO of BriaCell, which is bringing a cellular approach to cancer immunotherapy. Building on their knowledge about HLA molecules, BriaCell is genetically engineering multiple HLA types of therapy to match the HLA types of cancer patients. Breast cancer and other cancers like prostate cancer, lung cancer, and melanoma are being explored for treatment with this approach. Individuals have up to 14 different HLA molecules, and BriaCell has seen that a single match is a strong predictor of the success of treatment. Bill elaborates, "So, what we notice is that with our cellular therapy, we can predict patients that are very likely to respond based on the HLA type of a patient matching the HLA type of our cellular therapy  The way that we do this, practically speaking, is we take our cells, grow them under GMP conditions, good manufacturing practice conditions  Then after we harvest them, we irradiate them so they can't grow anymore, but they're still alive  They are viable, but