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Despite the recent approval of two cancer therapies that use CAR T cells to treat lymphoma, 25 percent of eligible patients still choose to enter clinical trials instead of undergoing the available treatments. That’s according to insurance claims analyzed by health care consulting firm Vizient, Reuters reports.
Cost may be the driving factor behind patients’ decisions to forgo CAR T therapies already on the market for those still in clinical trials. Approved CAR T interventions Kymriah and Yescarta carry price tags in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while experimental treatments are typically covered by the trials’ sponsors. “Inadequate inpatient reimbursement, especially for Medicare patients, can be a significant deterrent for hospitals to use commercially approved CAR-Ts,” Jennifer Tedaldi, associate principal at consulting firm ZS Associates, tells Reuters.
CAR T therapies involve extracting a patient’s T cells, engineering them to contain chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), ...
