Biotech Values

[Biowatch]

From No Hope to a Potential Cure for a Deadly Blood Cancer
Multiple myeloma is considered incurable, but a third of patients in a Johnson & Johnson clinical trial have lived without detectable cancer for years after facing certain death.

A group of 97 patients had longstanding multiple myeloma, a common blood cancer that doctors consider incurable, and faced a certain, and extremely painful, death within about a year.

They had gone through a series of treatments, each of which controlled their disease for a while. But then it came back, as it always does. They reached the stage where they had no more options and were facing hospice.

They all got [CAR-T] immunotherapy, in a study that was a last-ditch effort.

A third responded so well that they got what seems to be an astonishing reprieve. The immunotherapy developed by Legend Biotech, a company founded in China, seems to have made their cancer disappear. And after five years, it still has not returned in those patients — a result never before seen in this disease…

… For Anne Stovell of New York, one of the study patients whose cancer disappeared, the result is almost too good to be true.

She says she went through nine drugs to control her cancer after it was diagnosed in 2010, some of which had horrendous side effects. Each eventually failed…

…The drugs are “hideously expensive,” Dr. June said, costing more than $100,000 a year.

The total cost over the years can be millions of dollars, Dr. June said, usually paid by insurers, “and it doesn’t even cure you.”

CAR-T is expensive too. Carvykti’s list price is $555,310. But it is a one-time treatment. And, more important, the hope is that perhaps by giving it earlier in the course of the disease, it could cure patients early on.

Johnson & Johnson is now testing that idea.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/health/multiple-myeloma-car-t-immunotherapy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NE8.IZMn.fE98G03BClji&smid=url-share

See my previos post:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171724103&txt2find=Multiple%20myeloma