Breakthrough Cancer Therapy Stalls in Manufacturing Bottleneck

Drug companies like GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Gilead are banking on cutting-edge cancer treatments known as CAR-T, but manufacturing bottlenecks are holding back the market.

Since Novartis broke open the market in 2017 with Kymriah, followed a few months later by Gilead Science’s Yescarta, scientific development of CAR-T therapies is booming and unlikely to slow down.

But the breakthrough success of of CAR-T, which essentially trains immune system cells to kill off cancer cells, is so new that manufacturing systems still need to catch up. The speed of the initial laboratory successes creates challenges in scaling up therapies as they move ...