Personalized medicine describes a treatment tailored to one or a few individuals who have potentially deadly health conditions, such as cancer that no longer responds to chemotherapy, or an infection resistant to multiple antibiotics. Although personalized medicine is promising, it is labour-intensive and expensive, and the pathways for its regulatory approval and reimbursement are complicated, since the small number of patients who qualify limits the design of clinical trials. Here we use recent examples of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for relapsed cancers, and bacteriophage (phage) therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, to show how Canadians could benefit from these personalized solutions.
Challenges that need to be overcome include ensuring equitable access, and deciding who should cover the cost of these important medical advances. CAR T-cell therapy for cancer that relapses after chemo CAR T-cell therapy was first approved in 2017 . In CAR T-cell therapy , the patient’s own white blood cells are harvested and modified in a lab to better identify and destroy the specific tumour.
The modified cells are then placed back into the patient, where they attack the cancer. CAR T-cell therapy has great potential for treating certain types of advanced leukemia or lymphoma . Many patients reach remission after the treatment, and some even have a long-term cure .
For example , the first CAR T-cell therapy led to over 80 per cent remission at three .