Kite CEO Arie Bellde­grun preps for a loom­ing date with the FDA as he tack­les first-mover ad­van­tage in CAR-T

New York — Arie Bellde­grun has a date with the FDA “with­in a month” that will dic­tate just how fast Kite Phar­ma $KITE will be able to file for an ap­proval of its lead CAR-T. But as of now, the biotech has ear­ly da­ta ready to go to meet a dead­line the CEO set for him­self in 2014: To file for an ap­proval of KTE-C19 be­fore the end of this year.

In a sit­down short­ly af­ter the end of Kite’s an­nu­al R&D meet­ing with an­a­lysts in Man­hat­tan, Bellde­grun re­it­er­at­ed one of the key themes dur­ing the ses­sion. He wants to nail down the first-mover ad­van­tage in CAR-T, and he’s ready to go with pos­i­tive three-month re­sults on the ther­a­py for ad­vanced dif­fuse large B-cell lym­phoma (DL­B­CL).

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