The company was acquired by Gilead Sciences, a biotechnology company based in the US, for approximately $11.9bn in October 2017. Headquartered in California, Kite Pharma designs and develops immune-based therapies for cancer treatment. The company’s TCR programmes are based on the TCR-GENErator ™ discovery platform, which was developed for rapid identification of TCR-based product candidates. Yescarta is the company’s first commercially available CAR T-cell therapy for the treatment of large B-cell lymphoma. The cells are then re-infused into the patient’s body to identify and kill cancer cells vigorously. T-cells isolated from patients’ white blood cells are collected and engineered with either a CAR or TCR gene before being multiplied. Kite Pharma develops T-cell based cancer immunotherapies by utilising CAR and TCR methods. In addition, the company will receive job creation tax credits from the local and state governments such as Job Creation Tax Credit and More Jobs for Marylanders Tax Credit. The Maryland Department of Commerce also granted $200,000 through the Partnership for Workforce Quality (PWQ) programme to support training.įredrick County is offering a commercial and industrial tax credit to Kite Pharma to encourage local manufacturing.
Financing of Kite Pharma’s CAR T-cell therapy production facilityĪ conditional loan of $2m for the project was approved by the Maryland Department of Commerce through the Advantage Maryland Fund, which was previously known as the Maryland Economic Development Assistance Authority and Fund.
The state-of-the-art facility will enable the development of personalised CAR T-cell and TCR cancer immunotherapies, which require complex, controlled and multi-step processes. It will also comprise 217,000ft² of manufacturing, plant and shipping spaces, which are designed to expand the company’s manufacturing capabilities through innovation. The facility will consist of a two-storey office building with a gross floor area of 62,000ft². We are greatly impressed with the Kite team and what they have accomplished, and share their belief that cell therapy will be the cornerstone of treating cancer".“Fredrick County is offering a commercial and industrial tax credit to Kite Pharma to encourage local manufacturing.” “The field of cell therapy has advanced very quickly, to the point where the science and technology have opened a clear path toward a potential cure for patients. "The acquisition of Kite establishes Gilead as a leader in cellular therapy and provides a foundation from which to drive continued innovation for people with advanced cancers,” said Gilead CEO John F. 29, 2017 and European approval anticipated in 2018. It currently has one product under review with the FDA–Axi-cel, the company’s lead product, with a U.S. While the company is focusing on specific types of blood cancer for now, it hopes the treatment can be expended in the future. Kite's CAR-T therapy was developed in collaboration with Zelig Eshhar, a leading pioneer in CAR T cell research and Chair of Immunology Research within the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, who is also on the company's scientific board. It is currently a very 'in' field, and Kate Pharma is one of its leaders". Steven Tepper, senior Pharma analyst for IBI Investment House Ltd., told Calcalist "all the big pharma companies are trying to get into the cancer treatment market. Food and Drug Administration, among them Basel-based Novartis International AG and Seattle-based Juno Therapeutics. It's a technique quite different from most drugs available in the market today, which are mass produced rather than specialized, but it may just be the breakthrough cancer patients are looking for, and Kite has rivals in the race for approval by the U.S. It is a clinical-stage company specializing in cell-therapy cancer treatments, which engineer the patient's own immune cells to fight cancer, a technology called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T. Now the company is looking to diversify its revenues and enter the cancer treatment market by buying Kite.īased in Santa Monica, California, Kite was founded by Israeli-American Arie Belldegrun, previously a director of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. The drugs made Gilead almost $20 billion in 2015, but a drop in patients and competition in the market saw that revenue fall dramatically year-over-year, while at the same leaving Gilead sitting on a cash pile of almost $36 billion.
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