Overview

Cellular Tissue Engineering Laboratory

The Cell and Tissue Engineering Laboratory (CTEL) within the Children and Adolescent Cancer & Blood Disease Center at Westchester Medical Center consists of a 7,800 square foot, current good manufacturing practice (GMP) facility housing 7 Class 10,000 manufacturing suites.

CTEL provides the following services:

    • GMP clinical lab to perform cell separations, expansions, processings, cryopreservations and transductions
    • QC/QA section for safety testing and audits
    • two separate cell processing sections
    • cell tissue culture area for cell/tissue expansion
    • flow cytometry for sterile cell sorting
    • cell culture for manufacturing specific cell types, like natural killer cells
    • viral vector for vector production and transduction

Several processing suites contain “state of the art” equipment (such as the Miltenyi Prodigy and CliniMACS, Becton Dickinson Sterile Cell Sorter, and Lonza Nucleofector Device) intended to facilitate and enhance Cellular Therapy (CT) manufacture under human somatic cell therapy investigational new drug applications (INDs). Laboratory staff are dedicated to cellular therapy (CT) and hematopoietic progenitor cell (HPC) processing intended for transplant in the treatment of hematological malignancies and non-malignant diseases.

Key Team Members/Disciplines

  • Director: Mitchell S. Cairo, MD
  • Manager: Janet Ayello, MS, MT(ASCP)
  • QA Coordinator: Olivia Rigot, PhD
  • Technical Staff: Edward Kuhns, MPH, Lin-Marie Colon, BS, Bernadette Fallon, MS, and Heather Trask, BS, CLS (ASCP)
  • Translational Immunology: Yaya Chu, PhD
  • Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine: Yanling Liao, PhD

KEY CONTACTS

DIRECTOR:
Mitchell S. Cairo, MD
Mitchell_Cairo@nymc.edu
(914) 594-2150
MANAGER:
Janet Ayello, MS, MT(ASCP)
Janet.Ayello@wmchealth.org
(914) 493-1671
QA COORDINATOR:

Diseases

Hematological malignancies occurring in children,
adolescents and young adults include:

Future growth will include regenerative therapy for a wide range of human diseases.

Unique Features

  • Production of natural killer (NK) cells for treatment of lymphomas
  • Production of Cytotoxic T cells (CTL) for treatment of Hodgkin’s lymphoma
  • Production of Cytotoxic T cells (CTL) for treatment of recurrent/refractory soft tissue and bone sarcomas
  • Depletion of haploidentical T cells in poor risk sickle cell disease
  • CD34 Enrichment of Familial or Unrelated Allogeneic Stem Cells for malignant or non-malignant disease
  • Preparation of Cord Blood and Placental Blood in neonates with hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy