India, Oct. 19 -- Problem

CAR-T cell therapy can bring patients with relapsed blood cancers back from the brink, but for years it lived almost entirely in the US and Europe, at prices that put it out of reach for nearly every Indian family. Patients who had run out of options at home faced a choice between an overseas treatment costing several hundred thousand dollars and no treatment at all.

Product

NexCAR19 (actalycabtagene autoleucel) is an autologous CD19-directed CAR-T therapy: a patient's own T cells are collected, engineered to recognise a protein on cancerous B cells, and infused back as a single dose. Its CAR was designed at IIT Bombay with a humanised binder, which the team says lowers toxicity compared with designs that rely...