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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: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @12:14PM
A friend of mine actually works on a program similar to this, though it's for another form of cancer.
The $373,000 price tag is because the treatment is custom-tailored to each individual patient's immune system. They have to extract white blood cells (which are part of your immune system) and cancer cells from the patient, and then design a virus that will attack the white blood cells and instead of killing them, change them so that they view the cancer as an invading bacteria instead of ignoring it. Right now the process is mostly manual, so you're involving a bunch of PhD biochemists and a few man-months (or person-months) of work per patient using expensive lab equipment.
But if the concept keeps working reliably - and my friend said that for the type of cancer he works on, it's over 80% effective - they'll start figuring out how to automate more of the process. It could be a $300 over-the-counter kit from a pharmacist in twenty years.