Gilead’s Kite Hopes To Reinforce Commercial CAR-T Lead With Yescarta Data

Gilead Sciences, Inc., through its Kite Pharma subsidiary, has taken the lead in the CD19-directed CAR-T cell therapy market with Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel), a position that appears to be reinforced by new, longer-term data in large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL) that were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting.

Kite reported results from the Phase III ZUMA-7 clinical trial of Yescarta at ASCO on 5 June. The study tested Yescarta in the second-line setting where the standard of care (SOC) given with curative intent has for nearly three decades consisted of a multistep regimen starting with platinum-based chemotherapy and culminating with autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT), which constituted ZUMA-7’s comparator arm