Cell and gene therapy (CGT) has spent much of its young history proving what was once considered improbable: that advanced therapies can tackle diseases previously viewed as untreatable and, in some cases, offer the prospect of a cure. Now, according to Alexander Seyf, CEO and founder of Act for Hope, the sector faces another test—whether the ecosystem surrounding those therapies can work together well enough to deliver them at scale.
“Scientific possibility alone does not create patient access,” Seyf says.
That distinction sits at the heart of Act for Hope, a not-for-profit, member-led initiative created to accelerate growth across the CGT industry through collaboration. Seyf argues that advanced therapies demand a fundamentally different model from conventional pharmaceuticals because their delivery depends on a tightly connected chain of stakeholders.
From patient identification and starting-material collection through manufacturing, testing, release, logistics, treatment, and long-term follow-up, CGT can involve hospitals, manufacturers, contract development and manufacturing organizations, technology suppliers, regulators, payers, academics, and patients.
“No single organization controls that entire journey,” Seyf says. “That makes collaboration not simply desirable, but foundational.”
While the industry frequently discusses expanding manufacturing capacity, Seyf believes another capability must scale alongside it: collaboration. Shared standards, interoperable digital systems, responsible data exchange, and greater alignment between organizations could become increasingly important as more therapies progress toward commercialization and wider patient populations.
“A therapy may be developed by one organization, but access can only be delivered by an ecosystem,” he adds. “Collaboration has to become infrastructure rather than aspiration.”
Fragmentation carries a hidden cost
One obstacle is that CGT’s rapid development has also produced a highly fragmented operating environment. Companies and institutions have built their own processes, terminology, data structures, and technology platforms—often for sound individual reasons. Collectively, however, those differences can create duplicated work, manual handoffs, disconnected systems, and repeated attempts to solve similar problems.
At relatively low treatment volumes, those inefficiencies might be manageable. At global scale, Seyf says, they risk becoming barriers to patient access by increasing cost, complexity, and time.
The challenge is not to standardize the underlying science, he stresses. Rather, the opportunity lies in harmonizing interfaces and processes where differentiation provides little competitive value.
“The industry has historically been exceptionally good at protecting intellectual property and competing on innovation,” Seyf says. “The next phase requires us to become equally good at identifying the areas where we should not compete.”
Act for Hope aims to provide a neutral setting for that work. Its focus includes standardization, digitization, implementation tools, and responsible, permissioned benchmarking, bringing organizations together to address common bottlenecks without compromising proprietary technologies or intellectual property.
“Collaboration should not mean giving away competitive advantage,” Seyf adds. “It should mean collectively removing the inefficiencies that provide no competitive advantage to anyone.”
Connecting innovation with patients
Two planned projects illustrate that approach. Act for Hope is developing a clinical-trial portal intended to make advanced therapy trials easier to discover and navigate. Despite rapid global innovation, Seyf says, connecting potentially eligible patients with trials remains unnecessarily complicated. A second project, the initiatives hub, is a patient-access portal intended to improve connections among stakeholders involved in moving therapies from scientific development to treatment. Both projects reflect a broader premise: increasing manufacturing output alone will not solve CGT’s access challenge.
“The first chapter of CGT was about proving that the science could work,” Seyf says. “The next chapter must be about proving that the ecosystem can work at scale.”
Technology, automation, and artificial intelligence are likely to play major roles in that transition, but Seyf cautions that technology cannot resolve organizational fragmentation by itself.
“Technology can connect systems. Collaboration connects people, organizations, and purpose,” he adds. “We need both.”
For Seyf, the ultimate benchmark is therefore not the number of therapies approved, facilities constructed, or technologies deployed. It is whether the expanding CGT ecosystem can translate those advances into treatment for the patients who need them. That, he argues, will make collaboration not a supporting feature of CGT’s next era, but one of its defining pieces of infrastructure.