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Imagine a baby entering the world on their way to a life of health without worry about cancer, brain, autoimmune or other diseases. 

It’s a dream shared by families and researchers at the University of Ģ����ý's (CSM), as they look for new ways to not only treat these conditions, but to prevent them altogether by giving the body new “living” tools.  

As UĢ����ý marks its 60th anniversary, the CSM’s interdisciplinary research initiative is a vivid example of the profound impact the university’s medical research has had since 1966. 

It leverages the strengths and momentum of the CSM’s world-leading (IMC), , and several institutes.

, PhD, leads a team looking into one aspect of living medicines: How the microbiome — the trillions of microorganisms in the body — regulates immunity and physiology. One of her focuses is on how early exposure to microbes shapes our immune system and can affect a child’s susceptibility to allergies, autoimmunity and neurodevelopment disorders. Another is understanding how the microbiome modulates the efficacy of cancer immunotherapies. 

“What these microbes do in a healthy individual is they provide signals to educate the immune system to be the best it can be,” says the professor. “Early in life, you have a critical window of development of both your immune system and your brain where you need signals from the microbiome.” 

McCoy and her Living Medicines Initiative (LMI) co-lead , MD, agree it is the next pillar in modern medicine and therapies, and highlights how UĢ����ý continues to lead the evolution of health-care education and research — something it has done since its earliest days. 

Understanding living medicines 

The medical world is evolving with a focus now on treating each person and their ailments or disease individually. 

CSM’s ongoing focus on precision medicine aims to provide solutions and treatments that take a person’s specific characteristics and health conditions into account. 

McCoy says the LMI is one aspect of this. Unlike traditional pharmaceutical drugs, it harnesses live cells from one’s body to create personalized medicine to build up a person’s defense or recovery mechanisms. 

She and her team of CSM researchers have pinpointed microbes in the gut that modulate immune function, inflammation and response to cancer immunotherapies.  

“The huge advantage of living medicines is that it’s the only system that can go into our body and do everything it needs to do,” McCoy says. 

In an ideal world, McCoy adds, one would be able to treat a mother during pregnancy with the right “microbial cocktail” to give their baby a head start on building a stronger defense system to disease, or to cancer patients prior to getting their immunotherapy to ensure their immune system has the signals it needs to respond best to the therapy. 

The goal is to develop these living medicines in Ģ����ý and get them to patients faster, which is especially revolutionary for patients who don’t respond, or who stop responding, to traditional medicines or other therapies. 

Living medicines and cancer 

The poster child of living medicines, according to McCoy, is chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell immunotherapy, which modifies a person’s own T-cells to specifically recognize and kill cancer cells, primarily in blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia.  

It’s an area of research where the school is a national and international leader.

As an example, Hay co-led a clinical trial of made-in-Canada CAR T-cells targeting B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in B.C. This demonstrated that made-in-Canada CAR T-cell products can be delivered safely and effectively. 

He says cancer cells can be elusive for the immune system and new therapies provide the body with another tool to fight the disease. CAR-T cells are also proving to be very effective in treating autoimmune diseases such as scleroderma and lupus, with Hay and colleagues developing a trial to treat adults and children with severe forms of autoimmune disease using this living medicine. 

Hay is also co-leading a new program focusing on binders, which are the parts of the CAR T-cells that recognize and lock onto a disease target. 

“To make the best CAR T-cells, you need the best binders,” Hay says. “Until now, we have to use whatever already existed. That limited how well our therapies could work.” 

It’s complex work, but he says the potential applications are endless for the work being done with the LMI and, at the end of the day, “it’s about giving patients hope when they need it most.” 

Bringing together research, development and manufacturing 

It’s one thing to do the research and make new discoveries, but McCoy and Hay would like to take the LMI team’s work to another level. 

After helping build UĢ����ý into a globe-leading centre for microbiome research over more than a decade, McCoy says the school has the mechanistic data and understanding of how the microbiome works to make an even bigger impact on the world. 

“My vision is how we move all these discoveries into developing microbial therapies and get them into patients,” McCoy says. “To make that happen, we want to build a facility to manufacture these microbial living medicines in an academic setting.” 

Anything built or manufactured to be used by patients must be made in a -approved facility and follow rigorous operational procedures. 

“We’re moving living medicines from the research bench to the patient bedside,” Hay says. “That means not just discovering new therapies but actually getting them ready for real people.” 

CSM’s dean says LMI is a perfect fit in an academic setting like UĢ����ý, opening new research and development opportunities while serving the public. 

“Our faculty takes great pride in the legacy we’ve built, and we look forward to building on it in the decades to come,” says , MD’85. “We are continuing to push the envelope on what is possible in medicine to make sure we are all leading longer, healthier lives.” 

All members of the UĢ����ý community are invited to for the May 28 introduction to LMI.