Novartis to partner with Penn in development of chimeric antibody T-cell program

Exciting news yesterday:
Novartis and Penn enter into multi-year collaboration to study chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technology for the treatment of cancer!

Here is one of the news stories from NJ newspaper.And another from a pharma news site.

See my prior post on my own visit to Penn to see if I may benefit from this therapy.

What is exciting here, as Dr Sharman points out in his new CLL and Lymphoma Blog, is that this partnership may increase access to this potentially curative therapy, not only in terms of clinical trials, as the 10 patients or so who have undergone this therapy were in a privately funded pilot study, but also to mainstream if the technique continues to be useful and is licensed by the FDA.

We can only hope this approach pans out. Some potential drawbacks are noted by Sharman and also in a post on CLLTopics, highly recommended because this therapy is not without its downside...