RE:CAR-T updateSeptember 30, 2023 - New York Post
The out-of-pocket infusion price can range from $375,000 to $475,000 per person. Big pharma companies like AstraZeneca and Novartis are already conducting trials on off-the-shelf technology.
Another development that could affect the staggering costs is transforming the treatment from a lengthy (and costly) hospital visit into an outpatient procedure, says Dr. Brian Brown, Director of the Icahn Genomics Institute at Mount Sinai in New York City.
“The goal is a scenario where a patient can come in, be injected with DNA or RNA that will turn a fraction of the patient’s T cells into CAR-T cells, and they will go and kill the cancer cells. That would have a big impact on cost.”
CAR-T therapy has the potential to be used beyond just cancer, like inflammation, and autoimmune disease, “and possibly even to treat aging,” he says. “It’s not science fiction because all of these things have already been demonstrated in animal models and will eventually move to humans.”
Though these seismic shifts won’t happen overnight—“outside of pandemics, medicine moves slowly,” Brown says — it’s still remarkable what they’ve achieved so far.
It’s very common for us to read results from clinical trials of new drugs and you have to squint to see the difference,” he says. “You read how the drug extended the life of sick patients from a six-month survival to an eight-month survival.”
But with CAR-T, he says, the numbers are more startling. “They’re reporting remissions of more than a year, and you don’t have to be a radiologist to see the differences. The tumor masses hadn’t just shrunk, they were completely gone from these patients.”
https://nypost.com/2023/09/30/car-t-cell-therapy-is-the-cancer-killer-the-world-needs-now/