In a study of 101 patients taking another CAR-T treatment from Kite for aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, 36 percent had a complete response to the treatment after six months. A one-time immunotherapy injection could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.īut it seems to work. Gilead CEO John Milligan said Kite “has opened a clear path towards the potential cure for lymphoma patients who’ve run out of options and are desperately in need of treatment.”

Kite Pharma (based in Santa Monica, Calif.) rounds out the picture with a personalized cancer therapy, CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy), which removes immune cells from a patient’s blood and “reprograms” them so that, when reintroduced into the body, the immune cells head straight for the cancer cells and wipe them out.

FDA as early as the end of this year.įoster City, Calif.-based Gilead has developed treatments for HIV and hepatitis C, but hadn’t made headway into the immunotherapy and oncology space yet. Kite’s pioneering product to cure blood cancer lymphoma could be approved by the U.S. Kite Pharma is developing treatments that train a patient’s own immune cells to attack the cancers in his or her body. That’s a big part of why Gilead Sciences is paying $11.9 billion for Kite Pharma, founded by Israeli-American oncologist Arie Belldegrun. Developing individualized treatments may prove to be the most promising way knock out cancer. The nascent field of personalized medicine represents perhaps the biggest advancement in pharmaceuticals in a century.

Kite pharmaceuticals