More Global Expertise and Talent Are Needed to Administer Cell Therapies

Cellular therapies are one of the newest and most advanced technologies for treating various types of cancer. Since their implementation, countries across the world have sought ways to implement them into their health care systems, although the barrier to entry has been high.

Syed Osman Ali Ahmed, MBBS, BSc (Hons), MRCP, FRCPath, CCT, an attending physician at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, stated that talent is one of the larger problems facing lower- and middle-income countries in the cellular and gene therapy fields.

Ahmed spoke with CancerNetwork® about his presentation titled “Global Experience With Cellular Therapeutics” delivered at the 2025 Immune Cell Effector Therapy Congress in Kansas City, Kansas.

According to Ahmed, more talent is needed in every aspect of care for cellular therapies, from nurses to laboratory staff. The solution for this problem may be found at the country level, as authorities must increase the number of training avenues available. He also noted the need for more technical scientists who can manufacture cell or gene therapies.

Transcript:

Talent is at a premium at every level…. [There are] trained nurses and trained physicians in those fields who can deliver these therapies. That could be for the CAR [chimeric antigen receptor] T-cell therapy and a lot of gene therapies. It could be hematologists or oncologists and specialist nurses who deliver the therapy. It’s the staff who do the collection of cells, or the apheresis—the laboratory staff. That needs to be addressed within countries, at the levels of the authorities that produce the number of training lines available. There has been an expansion in training more oncologists, training more hematologists, or training more scientists in the blood bank or apheresis. That’s an issue. Then, if you go further up the entire supply chain—especially if you’re talking about manufacturing locally—there is a huge demand and a huge shortage of trained technical scientists who can manufacture an ATMP [advanced therapy medicinal product], whether it’s a CAR T-cell therapy or a gene therapy. Often, it’s not just the people producing it; it’s the quality assurance people, the people who are doing the analytics, the people who are doing the actual manufacturing in the clean rooms, and the people who know how the regulatory framework works. Talent is one of the major bottlenecks, even in advanced countries. Even in a European country that has a large manufacturing facility for commercial CAR T, 50% of its staff had to come from overseas. You’re just not able to train enough of the people. As this field grows, that’ll be an even greater challenge. Even if you’re able to afford it and if you’re able to have the health care system reimburse it, you need the people who are able to produce it and deliver it. That’s going to be a challenge that has to be addressed at every level.

Reference

Ahmed SO. Global experience with cellular therapeutics. Presented at: 2025 Immune Cell Effector Therapy Congress; September 27-28, 2025; Kansas City, KS.