Advanced Therapies Week 2027: What's Coming to the Cell and Gene Therapy Industry's Biggest Business Gathering

What This Article Covers

Advanced Therapies Week, the 22nd edition of what organizers bill as the premier cell and gene therapy partnering event in the United States, returns to San Diego from January 18–21, 2027. This article covers who runs the event, what's typically on the agenda, who attends, and why a conference aimed mostly at industry and investors is still genuinely useful for patients and caregivers trying to understand where regenerative medicine is headed next.

What Is Advanced Therapies Week?

Advanced Therapies Week is organized by Phacilitate, a Clarion Events brand that has run this gathering annually for over two decades. Unlike scientific congresses such as ISSCR or ASGCT, which center on peer-reviewed research presentations, Advanced Therapies Week is explicitly a business and manufacturing event — built around partnering meetings, commercialization strategy, and the operational realities of getting a cell or gene therapy from the lab to a paying patient. It's one of the few venues where regulators, manufacturers, hospital systems, and biotech executives sit in the same room to hash out the unglamorous but critical questions: how do you scale production, pass regulatory review, and actually get a therapy reimbursed.

Dates, Location, and Scale

The 2027 edition runs January 18–21 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California. Based on prior years' attendance, the event typically draws roughly 2,000 industry professionals, more than 250 international speakers, and around 200 exhibiting companies spanning biotech developers, contract manufacturers, logistics providers, and investors.

What's Usually on the Agenda

Past editions have organized programming around a consistent set of tracks that are likely to recur in 2027:

• Manufacturing, scalability, and automation — the persistent bottleneck in getting personalized cell therapies like CAR-T made faster and cheaper
• Gene delivery platforms, including viral vector and non-viral approaches
• Patient access and affordability, including how insurers and health systems are approaching six- and seven-figure one-time treatments
• Global regulatory strategy, as the FDA, EMA, and regulators in Japan, the UK, and elsewhere continue refining accelerated pathways for advanced therapies
• Early-stage development and the path from proof-of-concept to a registrable clinical trial
• Supply chain and cold-chain logistics specific to living cell products

Why This Matters Beyond the Trade Floor

It's worth being direct about what this kind of event is and isn't. Advanced Therapies Week is not a venue for new clinical trial data in the way a medical congress like ASH or ASCO is, and nothing discussed there should be mistaken for treatment advice or availability. But the manufacturing, regulatory, and reimbursement conversations that dominate its agenda are often the actual rate-limiting steps between a therapy that works in a trial and one a patient can realistically access — which is why trade press, policy analysts, and patient advocacy groups pay close attention to what gets discussed there each year. Announcements about new manufacturing capacity, regulatory pilot programs, or payer coverage frameworks have, in past years, first surfaced in this setting before reaching general health news coverage.

Bottom Line

Advanced Therapies Week 2027 will bring the cell and gene therapy industry's manufacturing, regulatory, and commercial leadership to San Diego from January 18–21. It isn't where new medical breakthroughs get unveiled, but it is where the practical bottlenecks limiting patient access to approved and emerging cell therapies — cost, manufacturing capacity, and reimbursement — get worked through, making it a useful bellwether for where the field's access challenges stand heading into the new year.