U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of a new, personalized cell therapy that supercharges the patient's immune system to find and kill cancer cells. The therapy, axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta ™), is the second of this new method of treatment, known as CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cell immunotherapy, to receive FDA approval for blood cancer patients in the past six weeks, and the first to treat patients with lymphoma.

This approval brings a new option to patients who do not respond to standard therapies.

The FDA's approval of Yescarta is for treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), the most common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), and several more rare types including primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL), high-grade B-cell lymphoma, and DLBCL arising from follicular lymphoma (transformed follicular lymphoma or tFL). Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a blood cancer that impacts the lymphatic system. More than 25,000 people in the United States are expected to be diagnosed with DLBCL in 2017. DLBCL is a particularly aggressive lymphoma, where the 5-year overall survival rate is approximately 60% and many patients present with advanced disease at the time of diagnosis. Patients with relapsed or refractory aggressive NHL have a particularly poor prognosis.

Read the full article on FDA approved CAR T-cell Immunotherapy at CNBC