A revolutionary new cancer treatment is now available in Canada, but provinces are being advised not to cover it until the price comes down — a price that is being kept secret from Canadians.
Health Canada approved Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) in September. It’s a form of CAR-T immunotherapy, in which a patient’s blood cells are removed, reprogrammed to attack cancer and then re-injected back into their body.
For the first time ever, some Canadians with specific forms of hard-to-treat leukemia and lymphoma can be treated with this therapy. If their doctors decide they’re candidates, they won’t have to wait to be accepted into a clinical trial.
But that approval created a Rubik’s Cube of decision-making problems: How to pay for a treatment so expensive that something else in the health care budget will have to be dropped, a treatment so new that there is no long-term survival data, a treatment so complex that some regions don’t have the facilities to offer it?
