The Food and Drug Administration has approved the second cancer treatment that will be totally personalized, proving that these kinds of treatments will become a regular thing moving forward.

The treatment, CAR-T, will be ridiculously expensive. It’s marketer, Gilead Sciences, has set a price tag on it for $373,000. While the FDA warns that its side effects could be severe, the treatment could have life-changing effects for cancer patients and pave the way for other rare cancers like multiple myeloma, rare lymphomas and leukemias.

The therapy itself has a complicated and hard to pronounce generic name, as most do: axicabtagene ciloleucel. But you could call it Yescarta. In this unique form of gene therapy, immune cells are taken out and engineered in a way to battle the cancer.

According to the FDA, Yescarta is the second therapy approved by them and the first of its kind for certain types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“In just several decades, gene therapy has gone from being a promising concept to a practical solution to deadly and largely untreatable forms of cancer,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said. “This approval demonstrates the continued momentum of this promising new area of medicine .”

The first CAR-T treatment that the FDA approved happened in August and it was aimed toward patients under the age of 25 who suffer from B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

The new one is targeted toward diffusing large B-cell lymphoma. This is the most common form on non-Hodgkin lymphoma and threatens 72,000 people each year. According to Dr. David Maloney, thousands of lives will likely be saved in the next few years because of this new treatment.

Positives aside, the treatment is not without its risks and the FDA has asked Gilead to take precautionary measures to avoid them.

One worry is that the immune systems of the patients could unleash a wave of compounds that result in deadly fever, along with flu symptoms. Half of the patients that were treated experienced some of these negative side effects. Among other side effects were serious infections, low blood cell count and a weakened immune system.

David Mitchell, a cancer patient and the founder of Patients For Affordable Drugs is optimistic about the future of the treatment, but remains skeptical about it’s price. He stated to NBC,

“As a cancer patient, I look forward to the potential of CAR-T drugs. But drugs don’t work if people can’t afford them, and no American should pay $373,000 for a drug that taxpayers helped invent.”

Do you think that something that can save lives should cost so much? Share your stories, thoughts, and hopes, with the Patient Worthy community!