For decades, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) has been one of the most successful cell therapies in medicine, with more than 40,000 transplants performed worldwide each year. Yet the field has a stubborn problem: not every patient who needs a transplant can get one. Ex vivo hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) expansion was designed to solve it, but progress has been slow. Only a handful of companies have pursued the approach, including Gamida Cell in Israel, ExCellThera in Canada, and Plasticell in the United Kingdom. [Read more…]