Seattle Children’s Therapeutics

Children deserve to lead healthy lives and to achieve their full potential. All too frequently the diseases they are diagnosed with don't have medicines to heal and cure them. Seattle Children’s aims to change this.

Seattle Children’s Therapeutics is a novel non-profit therapeutics development enterprise, devoted to envisioning and testing next-generation cell and gene therapies for cancer and other pediatric conditions such as lupus so children have the medicines they deserve.

The team that currently makes up Seattle Children’s Therapeutics has designed, manufactured and launched a robust portfolio of immunotherapy clinical trials for childhood cancer since 2012 in the areas of leukemia and lymphoma, brain tumors and solid tumors. As a compassionate and dedicated team, Seattle Children’s Therapeutics is energized by the science behind our work and finding answers to difficult questions. We are dedicated to communities affected by complex and rare childhood diseases, and these patients and families are the inspiration for everything we do.

Seattle Children’s Therapeutics Today

Today, Seattle Children’s Therapeutics encompasses Seattle Children’s cancer immunotherapy research program. It is comprised of an integrated set of resources similar to what you would find in a biotech company: research and development, technology development, GMP facilities for cell manufacturing, clinical trials development and management, and business operations. By organizing our assets into a vertically integrated structure, we set the stage for accelerated and unprecedented impact in cancer and other debilitating pediatric diseases. Together, these capabilities and state-of-the-art facilities will allow us to expand our impact in cell and gene therapies for a variety of childhood diseases and conditions beyond cancer, such as lupus.

The CAR T-cell products used in our immunotherapy clinical trials are made on-site in our Therapeutics Cell Manufacturing facility. This means we can deliver investigational treatments quickly to patients enrolled in clinical trials at Seattle Children’s. Through our collaboration with CureWorks, patients at member hospitals can also access Seattle Children’s immunotherapy clinical trials in their own communities close to home. Read about our FY23 year in review.

Seattle Children’s Therapeutics in the Future

While Seattle Children’s Therapeutics is currently focused on cancer, in the next five years Seattle Children’s Therapeutics will move into designing and developing cell and gene therapies for other life-threatening and debilitating diseases that afflict children.

Other areas we will expand into include:

Intellectual property (IP) licensing, sponsored research and clinical research agreements: Seattle Children’s Therapeutics currently has partnerships in place with industry organizations who are licensing our IP and sponsoring pre-clinical research and clinical trials at our organization. We plan to collaborate with new external partners who share our vision of providing children with new cell and gene therapies.

CureWorks expansion: We expect to offer more of our Phase 1 and 2 immunotherapy clinical trials to CureWorks member hospitals, thus bringing these experimental therapies as close to home for patients as possible.