We are pleased to announce that we have granted patent in Hong Kong after Japan, Korea, the US, Swiss, German, France, the UK, Italy, China and Canada for a method of obtaining monocytes or NK cells.
In recent years, many medical institutions offer an NK therapy and monocyte-derived dendritic cell therapy, each of which is an immune cell therapy. A dendritic cell therapy which uses acquired immunity and an NK therapy which uses natural immunity are frequently applied as a combined therapy due to their advantages and the diversity of cancer cells.
In the case of the combined therapy, dendritic cells and NK cells are obtained from independent blood so far. Components of monocytes to be differentiated into dendritic cells later are collected by apheresis (collection of blood components). Meanwhile, NK cells are collected from peripheral blood and grown. Therefore, the combined therapy generally requires two times of blood collection.
The invention makes it possible to obtain, from a slight amount of 25mL of the peripheral blood collected a single time, the NK cells which are large enough in number to be used in the immune cell therapy and the dendritic cells which are large enough in number to be used in the immune cell therapy. That is, the method of the invention allows an increase in usefulness of the immune cell therapy in which the dendritic cells and the NK cells are used and allows a significant reduction in temporal and physical burden on a patient to blood collection.
Patent No.: HK1204655
Date of Patent: 2021/1/22