The Advanced Therapies Treatment Centers and Their Network: A Model for the Accelerated Adoption of Advanced Therapies

Abstract

Emerging advanced therapies that include cell and gene therapies and tissue-engineered products offer substantial therapeutic benefits. They also present challenges for health services in their modes of delivery to patients. Funding was made available in the United Kingdom to establish three advanced therapies treatment centers and a network to coordinate their activities, supported by the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult. The aim of this initiative was to grow the advanced therapies sector in the United Kingdom by enhancing access to the National Health Service for patients and industry through close collaboration between advanced therapy companies and publicly funded services and regulators. In this study, we describe the initiative's antecedents, its collaborative structures and management, and its activities. A guiding concept in shaping and assessing progress has been the idea of institutional readiness, an idea developed in the context of social sciences that defines and so can measure movement toward an organization's full competence in delivering new technologies and approaches. We also report the initiative's outcomes and impacts as assessed by ourselves and by third parties. As the initiative has progressed, it has excited increasing interest from advanced therapy companies who were not aware of or engaged in it at the outset and from health care systems that wished to learn from its practices. It is to further that end that we present our study.