The Marcus Center for Cellular Therapy is a part of the Arthur M. Blank Children Hospital in Atlanta.
The new 19-story Arthur M. Blank Children's Hospital which towers over its 26-acre campus on North Druid Hills Road is being joined by a new facility that could help to save countless young lives and reshape the future of modern medicine.
The new Marcus Center for Cellular Medicine at the hospital is funded by the Marcus Foundation, whose founder, Bernie Marcus, was an early and prominent advocate of cellular medicine. It is a rapidly developing technology that often uses the body's own cells to promote healing.
For children suffering from leukemia, cancer of the blood, which was often fatal in the past, cellular therapy can be an effective treatment in many cases. Dr. Douglas Graham, who heads up the cancer and blood disease program at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, has seen a dramatic impact on survival rates over the past 50 years.
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"When we think of the impact cellular therapy has had in such devastating diseases such as pediatric leukemia," Graham points out, "there has been a paradigm shift, really, in how we treat children with relapsed leukemia and high-risk leukemia. We have effective therapy for about 80 percent of the kids with pediatric leukemia."
For Dr. Jonathan Simons, chief science officer and medical director of the Marcus Foundation, cellular therapies can help redefine the meaning of drug treatments.
"This is life-extending, lifesaving, and life-changing material. It's not like making a drug like penicillin or Tylenol. This is not like a little blister pack of pills. This is a whole new frontier for pharmacology and the pharmaceutical industry."
According to Dr. Graham, living cells can also be used to repair or replace tissues that have been damaged. There are trials currently at the hospital to use cellular therapy as an aid for children born with certain forms of genetic heart damage or to repair cartilage and other tissue damaged by osteoarthritis.
In the treatment of children who have leukemia that has resisted other treatments, physicians at Children's Healthcare are able to take white blood cells from a young patient's body and train these cells in a laboratory to seek out, identify and kill leukemia cells. These cells, called thymocytes or T-cells, are then infused back into the patient to help rid them of cancer.
"It's only been in in the last decade," Graham notes, "that we've understood how we can train these cells, by injecting instructions into the cell that help them identify, specifically identify, the cancer cells and not the normal cells, and to be able to kill those that are causing the disease."
But progress like this doesn't come cheap. For drugs, like Lyfgenia, that are used in the often-fatal disease of sickle cell anemia, the treatments can cost more than $3 million each. A similar drug, Casgevy, can cost $2.2 million or more.
But this innovative cellular treatment center at the new children's hospital is described as a Center of Excellence that could provide the expertise and resources to develop highly specialized treatments at a much lower cost. The Marcus Center is one of the few such places in the country that are developing cellular treatments for more than cancer.
Bernie Marcus, through his foundation, is considered by many to be one of the first philanthropists to recognize the potential of cellular treatments. The Marcus Foundation has supported research at Duke University, UCLA Medical Center, and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Recently, the foundation donated $20 million to Georgia Tech's Marcus Center of Excellence for Cell Biomanufacturing to explore ways of bringing down the cost of treatments from the millions of dollars to just a few thousand dollars.
According to the National Institutes of Health, cellular therapies have the potential to save 21 million lives annually. Research is taking place today that might someday lead to human skin being grown in a laboratory. It may mean that burn victims could be nursed back to health without scarring and those with spinal injuries might be able to walk again. Organs like kidneys and livers might even be grown in a laboratory, someday, experts say, maybe even without a human donor being involved.
Dr. Simons is assured that all this is not science fiction. The foundation is stepping up its funding in the field and expects to award a new series of grants this summer.
While Bernie Marcus has passed on, Simons believes that the same foresight that helped bring The Home Depot corporation into existence can help to revolutionize medical care.
"Bernie saw around corners, and he saw miles ahead, but then there's the work to do right in front of you, and that's what we're doing."