“The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies: New ‘Living Drugs’—Made from a Patient’s Own Cells—Can Cure Once Incurable Cancers. But Can We Afford Them?”, Siddhartha Mukherjee2019-07-15 (economics, gene editing)⁠:

Mukherjee traces the evolution of CAR T-cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy that uses engineered immune cells to eliminate cancer, beginning with the development of bone marrow transplantation by Fred Hutch’s Dr. E. Donnall Thomas.

In his article, Mukherjee profiles recent T-cell therapy research by Dr. Carl June at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania and other leaders in the immunotherapy field including Drs. Steve Rosenberg and Michel Sadelain and the Hutch’s Drs. Stan Riddell and Phil Greenberg.

In addition to the promising early successes with this new therapy, Mukherjee explores some of the challenges that remain to making these approaches more accessible and affordable.

In particular, the staggering price of custom single-patient CAR-T immunotherapy is in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, posing a challenge to health insurance and national healthcare systems.