Kite Pharma Inc.
Replenishing the cellular defenses of cancer patients
This article was originally published in Start Up
Executive Summary
Kite Pharma Inc.’s approach to cellular immunotherapy entails extracting T cells from patient blood, engineering them to recognize patients’ own tumor cells, and then reinfusing cells primed to go on the attack. While such ex vivo therapies have been tested for decades by expert clinicians with some success, Kite believes it will be the first to successfully commercialize them as options broadly available to cancer patients.