Five years af­ter No­var­tis made his­to­ry with the ap­proval of the first CAR-T, Kym­ri­ah, we’re get­ting a clear­er pic­ture of just how im­por­tant the ad­vance was for some pa­tients.

The phar­ma gi­ant may still be hav­ing trou­ble man­u­fac­tur­ing the treat­ment or reach­ing long-cher­ished goals of block­buster rev­enue, but a new study shows that its pos­i­tive ef­fects have good odds of ex­tend­ing out for years. And for many, it’s look­ing cu­ra­tive.

The five-year re­lapse-free sur­vival rate was 44%, says No­var­tis, and the me­di­an RFS was 43 months. “The me­di­an event-free sur­vival (EFS) for pa­tients in re­mis­sion with­in three months of in­fu­sion (n=65) was 43.8 months.”

“These da­ta mark a mo­ment of pro­found hope for chil­dren, young adults and their fam­i­lies with re­lapsed or re­frac­to­ry B-cell ALL, as re­lapse af­ter five years is rare,” said Stephan Grupp, the in­au­gur­al di­rec­tor of the Su­san S and Stephen Kel­ly Cen­ter for Can­cer Im­munother­a­py at Chil­dren’s Hos­pi­tal of Philadel­phia. “Since the ap­proval of Kym­ri­ah near­ly five years ago, we have been able to of­fer a tru­ly game-chang­ing op­tion to pa­tients who pre­vi­ous­ly faced a five-year sur­vival rate of less than 10 per­cent.”

These con­tin­u­ing re­sults along­side the suc­cess of Yescar­ta at Kite un­der­score the orig­i­nal hope that arm­ing pa­tient cells for an at­tack on blood can­cers of­fered a break­through ap­proach that would save scores of lives. It’s al­so a re­minder that the im­me­di­ate goal of cre­at­ing a sec­ond-gen, off-the-shelf ap­proach hasn’t been easy, though progress is be­ing made.

Kym­ri­ah earned $587 mil­lion last year, a 24% gain. The rev­enue steadi­ly drags be­hind the ri­val Yescar­ta, from which Gilead earned $695 mil­lion last year.

The drug has had its ups and downs in the clin­ic as well, with a fail last year in a Phase III for ag­gres­sive B-cell non-Hodgkin lym­phoma, cost­ing a con­sid­er­able amount in the still hoped-for block­buster sales to come. But it al­so just won ap­proval as a third-line treat­ment for fol­lic­u­lar lym­phoma.

This al­so isn’t the first time that No­var­tis has re­port­ed stel­lar five-year da­ta. Last year the phar­ma gi­ant an­nounced that in a group of ad­vanced, treat­ment-re­sis­tant NHL pa­tients, 46% had achieved a com­plete re­mis­sion, with 31% mark­ing pro­gres­sion-free sur­vival at the five-year point. And re­searchers de­ter­mined that durable suc­cess here hinges on pa­tients’ re­sponse one year in­to the treat­ment.

Cor­rec­tion: No­var­tis with­drew and cor­rect­ed its ini­tial re­lease out­lin­ing sur­vival da­ta, chang­ing a va­ri­ety of the fig­ures.

Belgian biotech Confo Therapeutics has landed $183 million, plus potential royalties, in a drug-discovery deal with Daiichi Sankyo.

Early Thursday, Confo Therapeutics put out word of the deal that will be focused on small molecule antagonists to go after an undisclosed target that the company says is associated with CNS diseases.

Confo CEO Cedric Ververken told Endpoints News that Daiichi originally reached out to learn about the biotech’s technology. He added that Confo, founded in 2015, will use its platform to drug a GPCR target that Daiichi has struggled with internally.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Boehringer Ingelheim reported human pharma sales of €18.5 billion on Wednesday, led by type 2 diabetes and heart failure drug Jardiance and pulmonary fibrosis med Ofev. Jardiance sales reached €5.8 billion, growing 39% year over year, while Ofev took in €3.2 billion, notching its own 20.6% annual jump.

However, Boehringer is also looking ahead with its pipeline, estimating “In the next seven years the company expects about 20 regulatory approvals in human pharma.”

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.