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TOI Explains
Since January, various hospitals across India have started advertising the availability of NexCAR19 to treat certain blood cancers. Research papers on NexCAR19 are being uploaded, patients who participated in the drug's trial are speaking about their near-death-to-remission experiences and there's a buzz in oncology circles that cannot be missed.
Why is NexCAR19 at centre stage? It is technically just another brand offering CAR-T cell therapy -- the breakthrough that got American scientist James P Allison and Japanese physician Tasuku Honjo the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine after more than two decades of work. Moreover, it's 12 years since the first patient, Emily Whitehead (who was six then), got CAR-T cells in their then experimental 'avatar' for relapsed leukaemia at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The answer lies in NexCAR19's tags: it's possibly the least expensive CAR-T cell therapy in the world at the moment and it's homegrown. TOI explains.
> What Is CAR-T Cell Therapy?
> It's a cell therapy in which a part of the body's immune system, T cells, are primed to target and destroy cancer cells (see...