A single leukemia cell inadvertently got mixed in with a batch of a patient’s immune cells that were being manufactured into a CAR-T cell therapy and it acquired resistance to the treatment with deadly results, University of Pennsylvania researchers reported.
Health authorities in England agreed with Novartis to fast-track access to the Swiss drugmaker’s expensive CAR-T cell therapy Kymriah and make it available to children and young people with aggressive leukemia when other drugs have failed.
U.S. employers are bracing for higher health care expenses in 2018 as spending on new drugs to treat diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and hepatitis C is expected to rise more than 7 percent, according to consultancy firm Mercer.
Novartis signed a major contract with Oxford BioMedica that could earn the British company more than $100 million over three years for supplying the Swiss drugmaker with material for its novel cell therapy CTL019.
In the race to get a CAR-T therapeutic to the market, Novartis announced that the U.S. FDA accepted its BLA filing and granted priority review for CTL019.
TG Therapeutics Inc. said a combination of its experimental cancer drug ublituximab and AbbVie Inc.’s Imbruvica outperformed Imbruvica alone in high-risk leukemia patients.
Novartis, lagging some other big drugmakers in the first wave of immunotherapy drugs that are revolutionizing cancer treatment, is focusing on the next wave of immune system-boosting medicines.
It’s expected that a large number of clinical trials will result in failure. 2016 saw numerous trial failures, but analysts at The Motley Fool selected seven failures that are expected to have a direct impact on the forward outlooks of the companies involved.
Novartis’ experimental CAR-T therapy CLT019 sent 82 percent of patients’ blood cancer into remission, according to interim data presented at the American Society of Hematology.
Juno Therapeutics Inc. said two more patients had died after suffering brain swelling during a trial of its experimental genetically engineered leukemia drug.