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Novartis’ Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel), FDA approved genetically engineered immune cells, would charge $475,000 per patient, will use Programs that Payers will pay only for Responding Patients

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

UPDATED on 9/1/2017:

This Pioneering $475,000 Cancer Drug Comes With A Money-Back Guarantee

Novartis defends the eye-popping price of its pioneering gene therapy with arguments about its $1 billion expenditure—and novel “value-based” pricing.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40461214/how-novartis-is-defending-the-record-475000-price-of-its-pioneering-gene-therapy-cancer-drug-car-t-kymriah

On 8/30/2017 we wrote:

FDA has approved the world’s first CAR-T therapy, Novartis for Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) and Gilead’s $12 billion buy of KitePharma, no approved drug and Canakinumab for Lung Cancer (may be?)

Curator: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2017/08/30/fda-has-approved-the-worlds-first-car-t-therapy-novartis-for-kymriah-tisagenlecleucel-and-gileads-12-billion-buy-of-kite-pharma-no-approved-drug-and-canakinumab-for-lung-cancer-may-be/

The Price for the Treatment was published on 8/31/2017, a Value-based Pricing Payment Model of a $475,000 per patient charge for the responding patients after ONE month of treatment. Novartis says it takes an average of 22 days to create the therapy, from the time a patient’s cells are removed to when they are infused back into the patient. Kymriah will initially be available at 20 U.S. hospitals within a month, Novartis says. Eventually, 32 total sites will offer the therapy. 

CAR-T gained national attention three years ago when Carl June, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, used to put a young girl’s acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Genetically altering the girl’s immune cells had made her deathly ill, but June had used a Roche drug, Actemra, to treat the side effects. She lived, and the results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Novartis bought the rights to the Penn treatment for just $20 million up front.

Pharma Buying the right to use from an Academic Institution is a known route to leap frog the R&D lengthy process of Drug discovery.

“I’ve told the team that resources are not an issue. Speed is the issue,” says Novartis’ Chief Executive Joseph Jimenez, told Forbes in a cover story about the work then.

The FDA calls this CAR-T therapy treatment, made by Novartis, the “first gene therapy” in the U.S. The therapy is designed to treat an often-lethal type of blood and bone marrow cancer that affects children and young adults. The FDA defines gene therapy as a medicine that “introduces genetic material into a person’s DNA to replace faulty or missing genetic material” to treat a disease or medical condition. This is the first such therapy to be available in the U.S., according to the FDA.

Two gene therapies for rare, inherited diseases have already been approved in Europe.

To further evaluate the long-term safety, Novartis is also required to conduct a post-marketing observational study involving patients treated with Kymriah.

The FDA granted Kymriah Priority Review and Breakthrough Therapy designations. The Kymriah application was reviewed using a coordinated, cross-agency approach. The clinical review was coordinated by the FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence, while CBER conducted all other aspects of review and made the final product approval determination.

The FDA granted approval of Kymriah to Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. The FDA granted the expanded approval of Actemra to Genentech Inc.

FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb in a statement.

“We’re entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient’s own cells to attack a deadly cancer,” 

“Kymriah is a first-of-its-kind treatment approach that fills an important unmet need for children and young adults with this serious disease,” said Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). “Not only does Kymriah provide these patients with a new treatment option where very limited options existed, but a treatment option that has shown promising remission and survival rates in clinical trials.”

https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm574058.htm

The Protocol

A patient’s T cells are extracted and cryogenically frozen so that they can be transported to Novartis’s manufacturing center in New Jersey. There, the cells are genetically altered to have a new gene that codes for a protein—called a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR. This protein directs the T cells to target and kill leukemia cells with a specific antigen on their surface. The genetically modified cells are then infused back into the patient.

In a clinical trial of 63 children and young adults with a type of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, 83 percent of patients that received the CAR-T therapy had their cancers go into remission within three months. At six months, 89 percent of patients who received the therapy were still living, and at 12 months, 79 percent had survived.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608771/the-fda-has-approved-the-first-gene-therapy-for-cancer/?utm_campaign=add_this&utm_source=email&utm_medium=post

CAR-T Therapies: Product/Molecules/MOA under Development:

• Similar CAR-T treatments were being developed at other institutions including
• Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center,
• Seattle Children’s Hospital, and
• The National Cancer Institute.
• The Memorial and Seattle work was spun off into a startup called Juno Therapeutics, which has fallen behind. Juno Therapeutics ended a CAR-T study earlier this year after patients died from cerebral edema, or swelling in the brain.
• The NCI work became the basis for the product being developed by Kite Pharma. Kite Pharma, which is awaiting FDA approval for its CAR-T therapy to treat a form of blood cancer in adults, was this week bought out by Gilead in a deal worth $11.9 billion.

On Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s 4th Annual Adoptive T Cell Therapy, Delivering CAR, TCR, and TIL from Research to Reality, August 29 – 30, 2017 | Sheraton Boston | Boston, MA

TUESDAY, AUGUST 29 – I covered in Real Time the talk on Juno Therapeutics: Building Better T Cell Therapies: The Power of Molecular Profiling by Mark Bonyhadi, Ph.D., Head, Research and Academic Affairs, Juno Therapeutics

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2017/08/29/live-829-chis-oncolytic-virus-immunotherapy-and-adoptive-cell-therapy-august-28-29-2017-sheraton-boston-hotel-boston-ma/

Precision Medicine is Costly and not a Rapid manufacturing process

All of the CAR-T products are expensive to make, and must be manufactured on an individual basis for each new patient from the patient’s own T-cells, a type of white blood cells, a process that takes weeks.

• How quickly companies can speed up manufacturing.
• Kymriah will be manufactured at a facility in Morris Plains, N.J.
• CAR-T technology, which has so far been used only in patients with blood cancers that have not been cured by other treatments, can be used earlier in the disease or for solid tumors: Breast, Prostate, Melanomas.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2017/08/30/fda-approves-novartis-treatment-that-alters-patients-cells-to-fight-cancer/#2aecb25b4400

Prediction How Patients will Far Well – Researchers use a big-data approach to find links between different genes and patient survival.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608666/a-cancer-atlas-to-predict-how-patients-will-fare/?set=

Modeling the cancer transcriptome

Recent initiatives such as The Cancer Genome Atlas have mapped the genome-wide effect of individual genes on tumor growth. By unraveling genomic alterations in tumors, molecular subtypes of cancers have been identified, which is improving patient diagnostics and treatment. Uhlen et al. developed a computer-based modeling approach to examine different cancer types in nearly 8000 patients. They provide an open-access resource for exploring how the expression of specific genes influences patient survival in 17 different types of cancer. More than 900,000 patient survival profiles are available, including for tumors of colon, prostate, lung, and breast origin. This interactive data set can also be used to generate personalized patient models to predict how metabolic changes can influence tumor growth.