The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) hails today's 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.

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

Read the full article about cancer treatment from The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society