There’s a race to get two revolutionary fresh cancer treatments on the market — here’s who’s in the lead
Cancer cells seen on a large screen connected to a microscope at the CeBit computer fair in Hanover, Germany, in 2012. Reuters
Two cutting-edge treatments for blood cancersВ are poised to get approved by the end of the year.В
The very personalized treatment is called CAR T-cell therapy. It’s a typeВ of cancer immunotherapy, or aВ therapy that corset the figure’s immune system to take on cancer cells.
Brief for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, CAR-TВ treatment takes a person’s own cells, eliminates them from the assets, re-engineers them, and then puts the cells back in the figure where they can attack cancer cells. There are a handful of companies developing the therapies, but two in particular are vyingВ to have theirs becomeВ the very first to ever get approved. В
Drug giantВ Novartis’ very first CAR-T bet is CTL019, a treatment for pediatric acute lymphoblastic lymphoblastic leukemia. In December ,В Novartis introduced clinical data that showcased В that the treatment eliminated acute lymphoblastic leukemia, an aggressive blood cancer, in 82% of the patients treated.
The companyВ expected to get a decision from the FDA by October, Bloomberg reports, and the drug willВ go before the FDA in July for an advisory committee meeting, which could give us a hint on whether or not the therapyВ will be approved.
The following month,В Kite Pharma, the other company in the race, is expected to get an response from the FDA. That’s for Kite’sВ CAR-T treatment for aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (more general than DLBCL). In data Kite released inВ February, the company found that out ofВ the one hundred one patients, 36% had a finish response to the treatment after six months.В
It’s a type of cancer that Novartis wants to get approval for in the future.В On Wednesday, Novartis released data from its Phase two trialВ of CTL019В in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL for brief), an aggressive form of lymphomaВ that’s one of the two types Kite’s data looks at. The trialВ found that of the fifty one patients with DLBCL, 23В had either a accomplish response (meaning the cancer had disappeared totally) or a partial response (meaning their tumor displayed signs that it was shrinking).
In a release, the trial’s lead investigator said the results were “incredible,” considering the patients had gone through a number of other cancer treatments before taking part in the trial.
But while the results might be promising, there are a few other challenges facing these fresh treatments:
- The one-time treatments won’t come cheap. While companies might price the drug based on how well it works, the price tag could still be more than $300,000.В
- ManufacturingВ the drugs is no petite feat, considering the personalized treatment requires taking out a person’s cells, reprogramming them, then inserting them again. The company that’s able to do that quickly and securely could have the advantage in the competitive CAR T space.
- These kinds of treatments have been deadly in the past.В In May, Kite Pharma exposed that one person had diedВ in a clinical trial for its late-stage CAR-T therapy from cerebral edema, a condition in which excessive fluid causes the brain to erect. And in July 2016, another CAR-T company, Juno Therapeutics, said four people in its clinical trials had died, all from cerebral edema.