All about Qartemi, made in India

Therapy will cost Rs. 35 to 50 lakh. India sees around 1.20 lakh new blood cancer cases and over 70,000 deaths annually from leukemia, lymphoma & multiple myeloma.

Sumi Sukanya Dutta

Free Press Journal

For blood cancer patients in India suffering from an advanced or relapsed form of the disease, another “living drug” has been cleared, nearly a year after the country’s apex drug regulator approved the first homegrown cutting edge immunotherapy, CAR-T therapy. A “living drug” is a therapy which involves removing and modifying a patient’s cells, then infusing them back into the patient. They are also known as cellular therapies.

The Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) has approved Chimeric Antigen Receptor or CAR T-cell, named Qartemi by Immuneel Therapeutics, for adult B-cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (B-NHL), a common and aggressive type of blood cancer. The company is a celland- gene therapy start-up backed by Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and US-based oncologist and author Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. Called Qartemi India’s “first international CAR T-cell therapy”, the product has been licensed from Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (HCB), a globally renowned institution for cell therapy innovation.

In response to a query by The Print, Immuneel said the therapy would cost about Rs. 35 to 50 lakh, but still a fraction of what the treatment costs in the US. As part of clinical trials in the country – named IMAGINE — the therapy was tested in blood cancer patients across Narayana Hospital in Bengaluru, Apollo Cancer Hospital in Chennai and Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh.

Immuneel said that in the Phase 2 trial, the therapy achieved 83.3 percent ORR or overall response rate (the measurement of partial or full response in patients following a treatment) – “setting a new benchmark for CAR-T therapy in India”. India faces a rising burden of blood cancers, with around 120,000 new cases and over 70,000 deaths annually from leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, board director & co-founder of the company, said that its flagship CAR T-cell therapy aimed to transform cancer treatment in India by providing globally advanced, personalised therapies at an affordable cost.

“While this price reflects the complexity of manufacturing personalised CAR T-cell therapy, it is still significantly more affordable compared to similar global options, ensuring access for Indian patients without compromising on quality,” the company told The Print. According to Dr Mukherjee, another board director and co-founder of Immuneel, by combining world-class research CART cell therapy with indigenous manufacturing, the company is “offering new hope to patients facing aggressive blood cancers”. “By bringing globally benchmarked CAR-T cell therapy to India, we are not only providing a breakthrough treatment but also redefining what is possible in precision medicine.

This is a critical step in ensuring that advanced, life-saving therapies are within reach for patients who need them most,” he said. In October 2023, CDSCO had approved Nex- CAR19, a CAR-T cell therapy by ImmunoACT, a company incubated at IIT-Bombay and developed in collaboration with Tata Memorial Centre for the treatment of leukemia and refractory or relapsed lymphoma (cancers of the lymph system).

Targeting cancer through engineered cells: Immunotherapies for cancer, through which monoclonal antibodies or special types of proteins called antibodies made in laboratories are infused in patients, have been around for more than two decades.

But in the case of CAR Tcell therapy, a type of white blood cells called T-cells are taken out from a patient’s body through a process called apheresis and are genetically engineered to recognise the cancer cells, multiply faster and stay for longer duration in a patient’s body.