The Washington Post reported last Wednesday, August 7^th, that Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), announced that Medicare will cover CAR T-cell therapy for the treatment of blood cancers such as lymphoma and leukemia, where it has shown remarkable complete responses of up to 80% in trials for these diseases. The therapy can cost up to $475,000 for  a one-time treatment, not including hospital stay costs.

It is not known if CAR T-cell therapy (standing for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell) provides a cure, because the responding  patients have not yet been followed on a long term basis. In covering the costs of the therapy, the FDA is requiring the first two drug companies, Novartis and Gilead Sciences, which received FDA approval for their CAR T-cell therapy versions, Kymriah for lymphoma and childhood leukemia and Yescarta for lymphoma, respectively, to follow the patients for years and report the results to the National Cancer Institute, which will enter the data into a patient registry.

The therapy works by having the patient’s T-cells extracted, then “training” them to target a specific protein, or antigen, found on the surface of the cancer cells, then multiplying the modified T-cells, and re-introducing them into the patient.

CAR T-cell therapy is under development in several cancers, including kidney cancer (DoD’s Kidney Cancer Research Program has funded CAR T-cell research), but it so far it has not shown efficacy in solid tumors. If it does, it would be a major breakthrough in the treatment of kidney and other cancers, holding out the promise of long-term, durable responses for all cancer patients.