Director's Message | Spring 2026

There is a particular kind of excitement that comes not from a single discovery, but from the moment you realize that the infrastructure for many future discoveries has expanded to meet the moment. That is the feeling I have as I write to share news of the opening of the UCLA Center for Advanced Biotherapies (CAB), a 14,000-square-foot FDA-compliant manufacturing facility located within the Center for Health Sciences. 

For those who follow the arc of translational medicine, you will appreciate what this milestone represents. The journey from a promising laboratory discovery to a therapy that can be safely administered to a patient is long and demanding. It requires not just scientific ingenuity, but rigorous manufacturing standards, regulatory compliance, and the kind of specialized infrastructure that is, frankly, difficult to build and harder to sustain. With CAB, UCLA now has that infrastructure at a scale befitting our scientists’ ambitions.

CAB builds upon the proud legacy of the UCLA Human Gene and Cell Therapy Facility, which has long supported the clinical translation efforts of university investigators. The new facility, funded in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, dramatically expands that capacity: ten cleanrooms, including seven manufacturing suites capable of running multiple products simultaneously, two dedicated bioengineering rooms equipped for bioreactors and 3D printers, a specialized negative-pressure suite for viral vector manufacturing, and a centralized quality control laboratory for product characterization and release testing. Critically, the facility is built around closed-system and automated processing principles that reduce manual handling and support the scalable, reproducible production that modern cell and gene therapies demand.

The range of therapies CAB is designed to support reflects both the breadth of our faculty's work and the landscape of next-generation medicine: personalized CAR-T cells, iPSC-derived cell therapies, hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell-based gene therapies, dendritic cell vaccines, and natural killer cell therapies, among others. These are not distant possibilities; they are active areas of investigation in our labs today.

Facilities capable of producing these therapies under FDA oversight are rare. Having one embedded within an academic medical center means UCLA researchers can move experimental treatments directly from the laboratory into early clinical trials, cutting the time and cost that would otherwise come from working with outside manufacturers.

What excites me most, however, is what the Center means beyond our own campus. The facility is designed to serve investigators from institutions throughout California and beyond, and act as a training ground for the next generation of scientists and clinicians who will carry this field forward. In that sense, CAB is not merely a facility, it is a commitment to the broader ecosystem of regenerative medicine. I am grateful to the many colleagues, staff, and supporters whose vision and persistence brought this Center to life. The work ahead has never looked more promising.

Thomas Rando, MD, PhD
Director, UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center
Professor of Neurology and Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology