Curative Regenerative Medicines: Preparing Health Care Systems For The Coming Wave

15 Nov 2016

• By Faraz Ali, Ted Slocomb, and Michael Werner

We may be at the dawn of a new era of curative regenerative therapies, but their inherent nature may create barriers to adoption. The Alliance for Regenerative Medicine frames the opportunities and challenges for the industry, arguing that policy makers must begin to understand the ways that these therapies represent value for money.

Emily Whitehead was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) at the tender age of 5 in 2010. She had relapsed twice after chemotherapy and was out of options and near death when she was treated with an experimental chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) gene therapy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) that saved her life. Emily’s story was published on the front page of the New York Times in December 2012.

Three years later at the American Society of HematologyAnnual Meeting, pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG revealed that Emily was not...