Team

Valerie Lapierre, MD, PhD, is the Director of the Cell Therapy Center of Gustave Roussy (GR) Institute. For more than twelve years, Valerie Lapierre has run the GR Cell Therapy Center, which performs today around 300 hematopoietic stem cell grafts per year (including 100 allogeneic grafts), through an integrated GMP compliant process including patient selection, sampling, cell processing, cryopreservation, quality control, cell products delivery, follow-up and reporting. The activity of the GR Cell Therapy Center is dedicated to allowing dose intensity chemotherapy regimens and adoptive immunotherapy, in hematologic cancers and in solid tumors, such as testis and ovarian cancers in adults, brain tumors and metastatic neuroblastoma in children.
The GR Cell Therapy center has been approved by the French Health Authority (Agence Nationale de Sécurité des Médicaments, ANSM) for Cell Therapy and Experimental Advance Therapy Medicinal Product (eATMP) activities. The GR Cell Therapy center has been regularly accredited by the JACIE since 2008. Additionally, the GR Cell Therapy Center has proven its ability to set up innovative therapeutic approaches in cancer, from a technological, a regulatory and a GMP perspective. It contributed to the Phase II prospective evaluation of immunotherapy in NSCLC (Dex2 trial, Besse et al, Oncoimmunology. 2015), by manufacturing intradermal vaccine with exosomes from dendritic cell pulsed with tumor antigens. Currently, the GR Cell Therapy Center has been selected by the VRI for collecting cells and producing dendritic cell vaccine in AIDS patients and its technology was successfully transferred from the Baylor Institute (Dallas, TX, USA) in 2015.