New fault lines emerge in CAR-T therapy

For Car-T therapy to become anything other than a niche hospital procedure it has to move into early treatment lines. Novartis’s Kymriah seems unlikely to secure such an accolade, however, having today failed to beat autologous stem cell transplantation in a second-line lymphoma study.

For the Swiss group this is especially galling as Kymriah’s two big competitors, Bristol Myers Squibb’s Breyanzi and Gilead’s Yescarta, have just succeeded in similar trials. Still, it will be important to bear in mind trial design differences, though one take is that important fault lines are emerging between CD19-directed Car-T therapies.