Too Sick For CAR-T? Kite Reports Cerebral Edema Death

With its first patient death from cerebral edema, Kite Pharma Inc. has a difficult dilemma: It's developing complicated cell therapies for cancer patients with no further treatment options, but with severe initial side effects for its chimeric antigen T-cell (CAR-T) therapies, are some patients too sick to treat?

Kite reported during its first quarter earnings call May 8 that an extremely ill non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) patient died from cerebral edema two days after infusion of axicabtagene ciloleucel (axi-cel; KTE-C19) in a 30-patient safety extension of the Phase II ZUMA-1 clinical trial that supports the biologic license application (BLA) for the CD19-targeting CAR-T therapy. Kite fell 13.2% to close at $70