24 October 2017 - Imagine being the parent of a child suffering from leukemia. All conventional treatments have failed; the end of your child’s life seems near. 

Then a new treatment becomes available that seems miraculous. It retools some of a child’s own immune system cells to attack and vanquish the cancer. You learn that, in more than four out of five children treated in clinical trials, the treatment has worked, and the children live.

You might have to catch your breath when you hear the treatment’s cost: nearly a half million dollars. Perhaps more miraculously, the company that developed the treatment is offering to refund the money if it doesn’t work within a month.

This seeming fantasy has now become reality with the arrival of Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel). Produced by Novartis, the drug was recently approved by the FDA for use in patients up to 25 years old whose acute lymphoblastic leukaemia has relapsed or not responded to treatment.

Read The Hill Op-ed