Novartis signals ambitions for cancer treatments

Novartis pushing ahead with one of its most ambitious cancer therapies, a treatment that the Swiss drugmaker says has blockbuster potential as it extends that technology to a wider pool of tumor-ridden patients.

Europe's second-biggest drugmaker is planning to test its CAR-T treatments - which involve extracting immune cells and genetically engineering them to hunt and kill cancer cells before returning them into the patient's body - on lethal cancers of the brain, pancreas, colon, ovary and lung.

The company also has doubled its investment in manufacturing for these treatments.

The efforts put Novartis in a race with Juno Therapeutics Inc., Kite Pharma Inc. and Bluebird Bio Inc. to master the technology, part of a class of therapies that harness the body's defense system to attack tumors.

Novartis's initial target is an acute form of leukemia in children, and it expects to seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration early this year. Analysts estimate the therapy, CTL019, will cross $1 billion in annual sales in five years.

'This could be the most efficacious immune therapy as yet developed, and it's just early days with this technology,” Jay Bradner, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, said in an interview at the company's headquarters in Basel, Switzerland.

Novartis is trying to catch-up with rivals including Merck and Co. and Roche Holding AG in cancer immunotherapies. The company, which invested about $9 billion last year in research and development, has more than 30 cancer assets under development and is 'investing massively” in immuno-oncology, according to Bruno Strigini, the oncology chief executive officer at Novartis.