Renowned cancer physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee on Tuesday said one of the very important goals for him and his team is to make Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy affordable in India.
He was delivering the 9th David A. Hungerford Memorial lecture on ‘Beyond the Cancer Genome’ on Tuesday.
Mr. Mukherjee, who is a cancer physician at Columbia University, along with Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and 5AM Ventures managing partner Kush Paramar, has co-funded Bengaluru-based start-up Immuneel Therapeutics Pvt. Ltd. It is developing CAR-T cell therapy for lymphomas and leukemia (heme malignancies).
CAR-T cell therapy is a cancer treatment in which a patient’s T cells (a type of immune system cell) are changed in the laboratory so they will target the cancer cells.
The Indian context
“One very important goal for us is to reduce the cost for CAR-T therapy. In the US, it (CAR-T therapy) could cost $4,50,000 and this is usually after two rounds of chemotherapy, so we are talking about $6,00,000 to $7,00,000. Plus, there is induction therapy, hospitalisation etc. so the numbers (cost of treatment) could approach $1 million. This is completely not feasible in the Indian context. So, we have used every bit of Indian engineering and ingenuity in developing our CAR-T’s and make it affordable,” Mr. Mukherjee said.
In December 2022, Immuneel Therapeutics Pvt. Ltd. said that its CAR-T cell therapy reports have yielded positive results in the trial phases. “The early results reported results from the first 10 patients of the planned 24 patients to be enrolled. Both adult and children with acute leukemia as well as lymphoma patients post median 2 lines of treatment, including in post-transplant setting were enrolled. 80% of patients experienced complete clinical response at Day 28,” it said about the results.
