The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved Kite Pharma's gene therapy, Yescarta, which uses patients' genetically modified immune cells to fight cancer.
Yescarta is approved to treat adults with large B-cell lymphoma who have not responded to or relapsed after receiving at least two other types of cancer treatments.
The treatment marks the second gene therapy approved by the FDA, and the first approved for some types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Gilead Sciences, which acquired Kite Pharma in August, said the one-time gene therapy treatment will cost $373,000 — much lower than Novartis' recently approved gene therapy, Kymriah, which costs $475,000, according to Reuters.
"Today marks another milestone in the development of a whole new scientific paradigm for the treatment of serious diseases," said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD. "In just several decades, gene therapy has gone from being a promising concept to a practical solution to deadly and largely untreatable forms of cancer."
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