Gilead Sciences, the leading maker of drugs for HIV and hepatitis C, made an expensive and gutsy move into the cutting edge of cancer treatment this morning, spending $11.9 billion in cash to buy Kite Pharma, the developer of a treatment that attacks tumors by genetically modifying patients’ own white blood cells.
The deal recasts both Gilead, a company focused on viruses and tumors, and the field of cell therapy for cancer, which now will be guided not by start-ups but by larger, established pharmaceutical firms. (Kite’s closest competitor: Novartis.) It also sets the stage for a dramatic few months during which both the Kite product and the Novartis one are expected to reach the U.S. market at an extraordinary price. The treatments are expected to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient, and to conform to the unavoidable narrative of pharmaceutical innovation: medical breakthroughs at sky-high prices.
