The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a promising new treatment for a particularly deadly form of cancer, bringing hope to desperate patients while rekindling a global conversation about the escalating cost of new therapies.
The treatment, made by Gilead Sciences, is made by extracting patients’ white blood cells and re-engineering them to home in on tumors. Called a CAR-T, the one-time treatment has shown unprecedented results for patients with dire diagnoses.
Gilead’s treatment, to be sold as Yescarta, is the second CAR-T to win FDA approval but the first cleared for use in adults. A similar therapy from Novartis, approved in August, is used for children with an aggressive form of blood cancer.
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