Gene Therapy 2.0: CAR-T Cell Therapy
Kite Pharma's Yescarta obtained FDA's green light on Wednesday to treat patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). The good news boosted Gilead's stock price by 2%. Gilead had acquired Kite just last month for nearly $12 billion.
Yescarta, a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, is the second gene therapy approved by the FDA, after Novartis AG's Kymriah, which was approved in late Aug for a form of leukemia in children.
“Today marks another milestone in the development of a whole new scientific paradigm for the treatment of serious diseases. In just several decades, gene therapy has gone from being a promising concept to a practical solution to deadly and largely untreatable forms of cancer,” said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D.
CAR-T cell therapy is considered a form of gene therapy, as it transforms the patient's T cells into what researchers call a "living drug" to attack cancer cells. The approach is part of the rapidly growing field of immunotherapy, which uses drugs or genetic tinkering to turbocharge the immune system to fight diseases. Immunotherapy holds promises to treat a variety of cancers; in some cases it has led to long-lasting remission.
With CAR-T therapies, patients’ immune cells are taken from their bodies, genetically re-engineered to fight their cancer and then re-in fused. For more information about how CAR-T cell therapy works, check out this great video.