2025 Biotherapies Pavilion Participant Spotlight: Vitalant

What are your most important goals as a company for this year and next? What are you most excited to see develop?

For the service lines that I support, our goals for the next year include the following:

• Building infrastructure and services to support the delivery of advanced therapies to the broadest number of patients.
• Being a premier provider of cellular starting materials and testing services for basic research, clinical research and drug manufacturers.
• Expanding basic, translational and clinical research services in partnership with academic and industry partners.
• Continuing to expand transfusion and therapeutic services with a combination of novel service offerings and organic growth.

How did Vitalant first start collaborating with AABB? How do you see AABB’s role in helping companies such as yours continue to advance within the biotherapies field?

The organizations that would become Vitalant were founding members of AABB, so Vitalant is a long-time supporter and partner. AABB has introduced multiple innovative offerings to the biotherapies field throughout the years, including the long-established Standards for Cellular Therapy Services, new Cell and Gene Therapy Standards for Pharmacy and the Certified Advanced Biotherapies Professional (CABP) Credentialing Program.

We continue to partner with AABB and support and leverage its role as both industry advocate and pioneer in establishing clear standards for patient safety and access.

What do you think will be the next big development within the biotherapies field?

It's hard to say what the "one" next big development will be because the field is dynamic and going through many changes that are a natural part of the health care "revolution" led by the introduction and expansion of biotherapies.

From my perspective, the biggest development that will make the leap to improve patient access is the introduction of distributed manufacturing, which would allow for a patient-specific drug product to be produced close to the patient. This would reduce time to treatment, cost and logistics burdens. This is critical for the field, as the conditions that cellular therapies treat move from acute oncologic indications to chronic indications, such as autoimmune diseases, with much larger patient bases.

What do you find most rewarding about working within the biotherapies field? What advice would you give to someone starting their biotherapies career?

The most rewarding part for me is to be able to be actively involved in creating the infrastructure to deliver these life-saving therapies to the largest patient base possible. For me, it's personal because 30 years ago, at the beginning of my career, I was lucky enough to be a research assistant at a comprehensive cancer center that was involved in early immunotherapy research. I dreamed of the day we are in now, where T cells can be trained to "attack" a malignancy.

The advice I have for someone starting in the biotherapies space is simple, and I will have to borrow from something attributed to Walt Whitman and quoted by Ted Lasso: "Be curious."