Cancer Cure News: More Companies' Version of CAR-T Treatment Expected to be Approved
After FDA's (Food and Drug Administration) approval of the Novartis drug Kymriah, it is now expected that more companies will come up with their own version of the promising cancer cure.
Kymriah is the first and officially recognized drug under the CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy) category, which is described by researchers as the most potent cancer cure, especially for certain types of leukemia and lymphoma. While CAR-T is in its late-stage clinical trials, it has already left researchers in awe as it delivers results in cancer patients that have never been seen before.
Because of Kymriah's potential to be a real cancer cure, other drug companies are expected to have their own brand of CAR-T soon. In fact, according to reports, Kite Pharma's own version of CAR-T drug, the Axi-Cell, is expected to be approved by the FDA this November and is geared towards for the treatment of patients with relapsed, aggressive, and nontransplant eligible forms of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
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CAR-T treatment is not for everybody, though, thanks to its price. Kymriah, for instance, carries a price tag of $475,000. While Kite Pharma, Juno Therapeutics, and Bluebird Bio's respective versions of CAR-T drugs are yet to be approved, they are all expected to carry a price tag similar to that of Novartis' Kymriah.
Despite its high price, though, the approval of Kymriah is expected to open doors to more investment in other cell-based therapies and several other clinical trials for other types of cancers.
Therapies that involve the harnessing of the body's own immune system, such as CAR-T treatment, is not only the trend for 2017 but beyond. In fact, CAR-T treatment is considered as a living drug as it involves putting the altered cells back in the body so that they can proliferate and battle cancer effectively.
"I think this is just the beginning of a new era of gene therapy," Dr. Prakash Satwani, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Columbia University Medical Center, told Business Insider last month as he talked about the potential of CAR-T treatments.
