How Much Juno Spent on Its Failed CAR-T Drug

May 26, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

SEATTLE – Juno Therapeutics failed CAR-T therapy JCAR015, cost the company $46.4 million, according to analyst calculations.

In March, Juno pulled the plug on JCAR015, a once-promising CAR-T treatment. The decision to pull the plug on the therapy came only four months after a clinical trial evaluating of JCAR015 was halted for the second time following patient deaths. The trial was previously halted in the summer of 2016 following the deaths of three patients, but was cleared to resume by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration within days of the incident. All five patients suffered from cerebral edemas. The trial included adult patients with relapsed or refractory B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

So, after several years of research and trial data, not to mention the man hours spent in developing the CAR-T therapy and of course the lost lives, in The Motley Fool Brian Orelli calculated what the financial costs of the failed drug. Here’s Orelli’s breakdown over how much money Juno spent on that one therapy from 2013 until earlier this year:

• Aug. 5, 2013 to Dec. 31, 2013 -- $7.7 million
• 2014 -- $4.2 million
• 2015 -- $11.3 million
• 2016 -- $21.1 million
• Q1 2017 -- $2.2 million



Those figures add up to $46.4 million, but Orelli added the caveat that the numbers could increase depending on “wrap-up costs.”

While JCAR015’s failure was certainly disappointing for Juno and its deep-pockets partner Celgene , the company does have a number of other potential therapies in its pipeline. The company’s top candidate is JCAR017, a CD19-directed CAR T cell product. JCAR017 received breakthrough therapy designation from the FDA for the treatment of patients with relapsing and remitting aggressive large B-cell non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, including DLBCL.

Juno is expected to present data on JCAR017 and JCAR014, a CD19-targetting treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago. Juno is expected to present Phase I data for JCAR017 in patients with NHL that have failed other treatments, as well as a Phase I safety presentation for JCAR014. The JCAR014 presentation will also include data on clinical and laboratory biomarkers that may allow early identification of cytokine release syndrome (CRS) and neurotoxicity (NT), the company said.

The failure of JCAR015 allowed rival CAR-T drugmaker Kite Pharma to surge ahead with its non-Hodgkin lymphoma therapy, axicabtagene ciloleucel. However, that drug, which completed Phase III trials earlier, had its own setback earlier this month when Kite announced a patient taking the therapy died during the trial. Despite that setback, Kite still has hopes for bringing its CAR-T treatment to market this year.

Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapies (CAR-T) are engineered in a laboratory to recognize a specific antigen in a cell and then administered into a cancer patient. The CAR-T cells should, if all goes as planned, multiply within the body and target the antigen and eliminate the threat. However, as Juno and Kite have shown, one safety issue associated with the treatment is the so-called cytokine storm, a condition in which a patient’s immune system becomes overstimulated and attacks the body.