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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a gene therapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (blood cancer):
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the second in a radically new class of treatments that genetically reboot a patient's own immune cells to kill cancer.
The new therapy, Yescarta, made by Kite Pharma, was approved for adults with aggressive forms of a blood cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, who have undergone two regimens of chemotherapy that failed.
The treatment, considered a form of gene therapy, transforms the patient's cells into what researchers call a "living drug" that attacks cancer cells. It is part of the rapidly growing field of immunotherapy, which uses drugs or genetic tinkering to turbocharge the immune system to fight disease. In some cases the treatments have led to long remissions.
"The results are pretty remarkable," said Dr. Frederick L. Locke, a specialist in blood cancers at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, and a leader of a study of the new treatment. "We're excited. We think there are many patients who may need this therapy."
He added, "These patients don't have other options."
About 3,500 people a year in the United States may be candidates for Yescarta. It is meant to be given once, infused into a vein, and must be manufactured individually for each patient. The cost will be $373,000.
Also at The Associated Press, CNN, and STAT News.
Previously: FDA Approves a Gene Therapy for the First Time
FDA Committee Endorses Gene Therapy for a Form of Childhood Blindness
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday October 21 2017, @07:17AM (1 child)
I see a lot of attention is going to the price tag. Run the numbers folks, when we are talking about a disease that only a few thousand people are candidates for treating and a cutting edge treatment like this costs a crapload to develop and you only get a decade to recover the expense, blamo, insanely expensive. And since this thing has to be created for each patient, the per dose costs are going to be high even after the patents expire. As we get more of these sort of treatments and discover ways to reuse some of the same building blocks for multiple diseases the cost will eventually drop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @01:37PM
I wrote this up-thread: a friend of mine works on a nearly identical program, but I'm pretty sure it's for another form of cancer. The cost is that they have to custom-tailor the cure to each patient. So it's not a single drug or set of drugs, you're effectively getting a medicine with substantial alterations just for you and it takes a team of researchers using expensive equipment a few months to figure out what those alterations are.
The goal is to invest more and more into this kind of thing until the whole process can be automated. Then the prices will drop.