Gilead to buy Kite for cancer cell therapy
Novartis’s CAR-T therapy also gets US approval
Gilead Sciences has agreed to buy Kite Pharma, one of several companies developing immune cell-engineering approaches to cancer treatment.
Gilead will pay nearly $12 billion (£9 billion) in cash, in return for Kite’s expertise in chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) technology, which involves extracting a patient’s white blood cells, modifying them and returning them to the patient to attack their cancer.
The US Food and Drug Administration has also granted marketing approval to Novartis for its CAR-T treatment for leukaemia.