Two cutting-edge treatments for blood cancers are poised to get approved by the end of the year.
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There's a race to get 2 revolutionary new cancer treatments on the market — here's who's in the lead
By the end of the year, two companies' CAR-T cell therapies could be approved for different blood cancers.
Cancer cells are seen on a large screen connected to a microscope at the CeBit computer fair in Hanover, Germany, March, 6, 2012.
The highly personalized treatment is called CAR T-cell therapy. It's a type of cancer immunotherapy, or a therapy that harness the body's immune system to take on cancer cells.
Short for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, CAR-T treatment takes a person's own cells, removes them from the body, re-engineers them, and then puts the cells back in the body where they can attack cancer cells. There are a handful of companies developing the therapies, but two in particular are vying to have theirs become the first to ever get approved.
Drug giant Novartis' first CAR-T bet is CTL019, a treatment for pediatric acute lymphoblastic lymphoblastic leukemia. In DecemberNovartis presented clinical data that showed
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The company expected to get a decision from the FDA by October, Bloomberg reports, and the drug will go before the FDA in July for an advisory committee meeting, which could give us a hint on whether or not the therapy will be approved.
The following month, Kite Pharma, the other company in the race, is expected to get an answer from the FDA. That's for Kite's CAR-T treatment for aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (more general than DLBCL). In data Kite released in February, the company found that out of the 101 patients, 36% had a complete response to the treatment after six months.
It's a type of cancer that Novartis wants to get approval for in the future. On Wednesday, Novartis released data from its Phase 2 trial of CTL019 in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL for short), an aggressive form of lymphoma that's one of the two types Kite's data looks at. The trial found that of the 51 patients with DLBCL, 23 had either a complete response (meaning the cancer had disappeared completely) 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 "impressive," 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 new treatments:
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- more than $300,000
- Kite Pharma revealed that one person had died
- clinical trials had died
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