Cassandra Willyard in Nature:
“This whole process, it’s just inefficient,” says Saar Gill, a haematologist and oncologist also at the Perelman School of Medicine. “If I’ve got a patient with cancer, I can prescribe chemotherapy and they’ll get it tomorrow.” With commercial CAR T, however, people have to wait weeks for treatment. That delay, along with the high cost of the therapy, plus the need for chemotherapy before people receive the CAR T cells, means many people who could benefit from CAR T never receive it. “We all want to get to a situation where CAR T cells are more like a drug,” says Gill.
Some biotechnology companies have an answer: alter T cells inside the body instead. Treatments that deliver a gene for the CAR protein to cells in the blood could be mass produced and available on demand — theoretically, at a much lower price than current CAR-T therapies. A single dose of commercial CAR-T therapy costs around $500,000. A vial of in vivo treatment might cost an order of magnitude less.
More here.
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