It’s not a cancer wonder cure. It doesn’t help every child. However, Dr. Jim Whitlock says a radical new therapy that appears to kill the most common childhood cancer is one of the most remarkable advances he has seen in his 35-plus years of practice.
“We can now save children we couldn’t save before,” said Whitlock, division head of haematology and oncology at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
The drug, Kymriah, also comes with a colossal but secret price tag. While its “scientific ingenuity is marvellous,” McGill University biological scientist Jonathan Jarry recently wrote, the therapy, at potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars per dose, is also raising “the age-old question: what is the price of a human life?”
This month, Ontario became the second province after Quebec to announce it will cover the cost of Kymriah for eligible patients. The drug is part of a revolutionary therapy known as chimeric antigen receptor-T-cell (CAR-T) therapy that has been approved by Health Canada to treat two life-threatening blood cancers: acute lymphoblastic leukemia (or ALL) in children, and a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in adults.
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