Aryabhatta Sadhu, Consultant and Head Transfusion Medicine at Fortis Hospital, shared Luca Gattinoni’s post on LinkedIn, adding:
“It feels incredibly rewarding to know that a seemingly simple act of helping a fellow consultant with a patient eventually connects you to a landmark moment in the country’s medical history.
I was involved in the patient selection and ensuring adequate T-cell collection for this patient, with the collected cells serving as the leukapheresis starting material (LSM) for CAR-T cell manufacturing.
Only later did I learn that this was the ‘first CAR-T cell therapy case in the country’.
Grateful to have played a small part in a milestone that represents so much progress in Nepal’s cellular therapy. Sometimes, you only realise the significance of your contribution in hindsight.”
Luca Gattinoni, Director of Division of Functional Immune Cell Modulation at LIT- Leibniz Institute for Immunotherapy, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Three years ago I traveled to Nepal for an international meeting to raise awareness of cellular therapies in the country. This month, Nepal has treated its first patient with CAR-T cells manufactured locally.
It has been a privilege to support this effort from the start. Congratulations to my former postdoc Sanjivan Gautam and CRM Nepal for turning that vision into reality in just three years, and to Dr. Anjan Shrestha and the team at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital.
Nepal can now be a model for other low- and middle-income countries seeking to bring CAR-T therapy to their patients.”
You can also read: In Vivo CAR-T Cell Therapy: Clinical Proof of Concept and the Rising Role of AI
