What to Know About Access to CAR T-Cell Therapy
- CAR T-Cell Therapy, a powerful new immunotherapy, can offer hope to patients with relapsed lymphoma, especially diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, but access, cost, and manufacturing challenges can limit availability.
- Patients should discuss eligibility, logistics, risks, and financial support with their care team to understand whether this treatment is right for them.
- For a detailed explainer on how CAR T-Cell Therapy works to re-engineer a patient’s own T-Cells to become cancer fighting warriors, read more here.
The Realities of CAR T-Cell Therapy
While CAR T-Cell Therapy is a groundbreaking and promising new treatment providing a potential path to a cure for many patients whose diffuse large B-cell lymphoma has returned or not responded to standard therapies, this new type of immunotherapy comes with challenges and limitations that patients should understand.Dr. Adan Rios, a medical oncologist at the Memorial Hermann Hospital at the Texas Medical Center, is contextualizing some of these challenges for patients in the Houston area, which has a high proportion of specially certified medical centers with the infrastructure and trained staff to administer CAR T-Cell Therapy.
Read MoreAccording to data from the American Cancer Society, the cost of creating the CAR T-cells alone can range from $300,000 to $475,000 because of the complexity of how the cells are collected and made in a complex manufacturing process that involves re-engineering a patient’s T-Cells in a lab.
“The other problem is that sometimes the education of the cells may fail, so that you may do the collection of the cells from the patient, send it to the factory where they are supposed to be trained, and the training process of the cells may not yield the amount of active cells required to treat the tumor.”
In other words, sometimes, the cells don’t grow the way doctors hope. T-Cells are collected and sent to a lab to be re-engineered to fight cancer but occasionally they don’t multiply enough or become strong enough to fight the cancer.
Despite these challenges, CAR T-Cell Therapy continues to offer powerful hope for patients with difficult-to-treat lymphoma.
Expert Resources on Non Hodgkin Lymphoma
Questions to Ask Your Doctor
- Am I eligible for a CAR T-Cell Therapy?
- Where can I receive this treatment?
- How does my insurance handle the cost?
- What happens if the cells fail to grow in the lab?
- Are there clinical trials I could consider? Are there resources available to help with travel, lodging, and other costs?
- What are the risks vs. benefits of CAR T-Cell Therapy in my case?
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