HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 185

Houston innovator aims to scale cancer-curing cell therapies

Jason Bock, founder and CEO of the Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to explain the complicated — yet necessary — process of scaling cell therapies. Photo courtesy

It's almost unreal what can be done with therapeutics today, especially in the specialty of cell therapy.

"It feels like science fiction," says Jason Bock, founder and CEO of the Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center, or CTMC, a joint venture between National Resilience and MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Cell therapy is essentially personalized medicine, he explains. The process includes taking out a patient’s own immune cells, identifying specifically the T-cells, and engineer them to have them target cancer before expanding them and reintroducing them to the patient.

“The supply chain begins with the patient,” Bock explains on the Houston Innovators Podcast. “If the patient is going to be an integral part of the supply chain, one way to simplify your supply chain is to locate your manufacturing very close to where your patients are.”

That's where CTMC, located in the heart of the Texas Medical Center, comes in. Bock moved to Houston from the East Coast four years to stand up the program at MD Anderson. The founding thesis was to work with faculty members who have interesting ideas for biologics or cell therapies, help them industrialize them, and then bring them into the MD Anderson clinic to evaluate in patients.

Last year, the entity spun out into a joint venture structure with National Resilience, a company that was founded amid the pandemic to build resilience in the nation for complex biologics manufacturing — like vaccines, for instance — in order to expedite the process of getting these treatments to patients.

With access to patients established, how do you address scalability of this treatment in a field that's so customized?

While it might sound like a challenge to scale personalized medicine — it's a worthwhile challenge. Bock says that even though cell therapy is in its early stages still — the first treatment was approved by the FDA just five years ago — early studies have shown patients, who essentially have no other treatment options, can see life-saving results in as little as one treatment.

"We see in a large group of patients — 30 to 50 percent of patients — are cured with one dose," he says on the show.

CTMC has a 60,000-square-foot space two blocks away from MD Anderson. This critical lab space with 14 clean rooms was made available after its previous biotech tenant moved out. The setup can support up to 140 people, and the organization has grown to 80 people over the past few years.

Bock says CTMC is an engine for cell therapy research — one that can take a therapeutic from research to the clinic in about one to two years. Every year, he says CTMC can roll three to five therapeutics into the clinic phase.

And, Houston's an ideal place to do that.

"Houston has a chance to play a role in all aspects of cell therapy," he says, from discovery to the clinical side. "Some really interesting cell therapies that are in development were discovered here in Houston."

Bock shares more on how the impact CTMC is making on cell therapy advancement on the podcast. Listen to the interview below — or wherever you stream your podcasts — and subscribe for weekly episodes.


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Building Houston

 
 

Baylor College of Medicine's Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower is set to open in 2026. Rendering courtesy of BCM

Baylor College of Medicine has collected $100 million toward its $150 million fundraising goal for the college’s planned Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower.

The $100 million in gifts include:

  • A total of $30 million from The Cullen Foundation, The Cullen Trust for Health Care, and The Cullen Trust for Higher Education.
  • $12 million from the DeBakey Medical Foundation
  • $10 million from the Huffington Foundation
  • More than $45 million from members of Baylor’s Board of Trustees and other community donors, including the M.D. Anderson Foundation, the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation, and The Elkins Foundation.

“The Cullen Trust for Health Care is very honored to support this building along with The Cullen Foundation and The Cullen Trust for Higher Education,” Cullen Geiselman Muse, chair of The Cullen Trust for Health Care, says in a news release. “We cannot wait to see what new beginnings will come from inside the Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower.”

The Baylor campus is next to Texas Medical Center’s Helix Park, a 37-acre project. Rendering courtesy of BCM

The Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower is set to open in 2026. The 503,000-square-foot tower is the first phase of Baylor’s planned Health Sciences Park, an 800,000-square-foot project that will feature medical education and research adjacent to patient care at Baylor Medicine and Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center on the McNair Campus.

The Baylor campus is next to Texas Medical Center’s Helix Park, a 37-acre project that will support healthcare, life sciences, and business ventures. Baylor is the anchor tenant in the first building being constructed at Helix Park.

“To really change the future of health, we need a space that facilitates the future,” says Dr. Paul Klotman, president, CEO, and executive dean of Baylor. “We need to have a great building to recruit great talent. Having a place where our clinical programs are located, where our data scientists are, next to a biotech development center, and having our medical students all integrated into that environment will allow them to be ready in the future for where healthcare is going.”

In the 1940s, Lillie and Roy Cullen and the M.D. Anderson Foundation were instrumental in establishing the Texas Medical Center, which is now the world’s largest medical complex.

“Baylor is the place it is today because of philanthropy,” Klotman says. “The Cullen family, the M.D. Anderson Foundation, and the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation have been some of Baylor’s most devoted champions, which has enabled Baylor to mold generations of exceptional health sciences professionals. It is fitting that history is repeating itself with support for this state-of-the-art education building.”

The Cullen Foundation donated $30 million to the project. Rendering courtesy of BCM

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