EBMT-EHA CAR-T 2019 | The future of immunotherapy

So I mean, we’re not talking about tens of thousands of patients that have already been treated with these products. In fact we’re talking about hundreds of patients internationally that have been treated either in clinical trials or academic studies, or now commercially available products.

So we are in the infancy stage of the developments of these products. I think we’re also going to see a slew of other advanced therapy medicinal products, which these products are, coming through. Some of them in monogenic gene therapy disorders, others in CAR-T, perhaps in oncological disorders, not just hematological disorders, and then expansion in hematological setting into diseases other than acute lymphoblastic leukemia or Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and some of the other lymphoma categories, including CLL and indeed, also myeloma.

And I think once we start doing that, the numbers of patients that we may need to treat on an annual basis will go from a few hundred to several thousand and that will create logistic issues, as well as funding issues because these products are well-priced and therefore the pay alls, the NHS in the United Kingdom will have to find the funding to support this. But they are, as I said, disruptive therapies and I think if the longer-term data supports this, there is clear value in this whole disease area and treatment specific area.