Pioneering Cancer Drug, Just Approved, to Cost $475,000–and Analysts Say It’s a Bargain

August 30, 2017

(STAT News) – The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a futuristic new approach to treating cancer, clearing a Novartis therapy that has produced unprecedented results in patients with a rare and deadly cancer. The price tag: $475,000 for a course of treatment. That sounds staggering to many patients — but it’s far less than analysts expected. The therapy, called a CAR-T, is made by harvesting patients’ white blood cells and rewiring them to home in on tumors. Novartis’s product is the first CAR-T therapy to come before the FDA, leading a pack of novel treatments that promise to change the standard of care for certain aggressive blood cancers.