No­var­tis posts land­mark CAR-T da­ta as head-to-head ri­val­ry with Kite Phar­ma looms

Vas­ant Narasimhan, chief med­ical of­fi­cer of No­var­tis AG, looks on dur­ing a Jan­u­ary 2017 news con­fer­ence in Basel  Michele Lim­i­na/Bloomberg

No­var­tis’ pi­o­neer­ing CAR-T drug CTL019 (ti­s­agen­le­cleu­cel) scored high in treat­ing dif­fuse large B-cell lym­phoma (DL­B­CL), spot­light­ing num­bers that will like­ly al­low the phar­ma gi­ant to plunge head-to-head in the mar­ket against its main ini­tial ri­val, Kite Phar­ma. But No­var­tis al­so found it­self de­fend­ing its man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions Wednes­day morn­ing, as an­a­lysts ze­roed in on a num­ber of pa­tients who couldn’t be treat­ed in the study.

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