breakthrough cancer treatment approved

Opening a new era in cancer care, U.S. health officials on Wednesday approved a breakthrough treatment that genetically engineers patients' own blood cells into an army of assassins to seek and destroy childhood leukemia.

The Food and Drug Administration called the approval historic, the first gene therapy to hit the U.S. market. Made from scratch for every patient, it's one of a wave of "living drugs" under development to fight additional blood cancers and other tumors, too.

Novartis Pharmaceuticals set the price for its one-time infusion of so-called "CAR-T cells" at $475,000, but said there would be no charge for patients who didn't show a response within a month.

"This is a brand new way of treating cancer," said Dr. Stephan Grupp of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who treated the first child with CAR-T cell therapy — a girl who'd been near death but now is cancer-free for five years and counting. "That's enormously exciting."

CAR-T treatment uses gene therapy techniques not to fix disease-causing genes but to turbocharge T cells, immune system soldiers that cancer too often can evade. Researchers filter those cells from a patient's blood, reprogram them to harbor a "chimeric antigen receptor" or CAR that zeroes in on cancer, and grow hundreds of millions of copies. Returned to the patient, the revved-up cells can continue multiplying to fight disease for months or years.

It's a completely different way to harness the immune system than popular immunotherapy drugs called "checkpoint inhibitors" that treat a variety of cancers by helping the body's natural T cells better spot tumors. CAR-T cell therapy gives patients stronger T cells to do that job.

"We're entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient's own cells to attack a deadly cancer," said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

In a key study of 63 advanced patients, 83 percent went into remission soon after receiving the CAR-T cells. Importantly, it's not clear how long that benefit lasts: Some patients did relapse months later. The others still are being tracked to see how they fare long-term.

Still, "a far higher percentage of patients go into remission with this therapy than anything else we've seen to date with relapsed leukemia," said Dr. Ted Laetsch of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, one of the study sites. "I wouldn't say we know for sure how many will be cured yet by this therapy. There certainly is a hope" that some will be.

safety systems reduce car crashes

WASHINGTON — Safety systems to prevent cars from drifting into another lane or that warn drivers of vehicles in their blind spots are beginning to live up to their potential to reduce crashes significantly, according to two studies released Wednesday.

The lane-keeping study looked at police crash data from 25 states between 2009 and 2015 for vehicle models where the systems were sold as optional. Lane-keeping systems lowered rates of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes of all severities by 11 percent, and crashes of those types in which there were injuries, by 21 percent, the study found.

Because there were only 40 fatal crashes in the data, researchers used a simpler analysis that didn't control for differences in drivers' ages, genders, insurance risk and other factors for those crashes. They found the technology cut the fatal crash rate by 86 percent.

That's probably high, said Jessica Cicchino, the institute's vice president for research, but even if lane-keeping systems cut such crashes by half it would be significant, she said. Cicchino said about a quarter of traffic fatalities involve a vehicle drifting into another lane.

"Now we have evidence that this technology really can save lives and has the potential to prevent thousands of deaths once it's on every vehicle," Cicchino said.

If all passenger vehicles had been equipped with lane departure warning systems in 2015, an estimated 85,000 police-reported crashes would have been prevented, the study found.

Disney to leave Netflix

Disney is launching its own streaming movie service, and that means Disney will stop streaming its movies on Netflix.

But not right away. You’ve got a couple years.

And it’s possible that some of its most popular movies, like the Avengers and other Marvel movies, as well as the Star Wars saga, could end up staying on Netflix, after all.

Confusing, right? Here’s what we know, for now:

• Disney has announced plans to launch a Disney-branded streaming service in 2019. It hasn’t said how much it will cost.
• Disney currently has a deal that lets Netflix stream old Disney movies, as well as ones that have recently been in theaters. That deal expires near the end of 2019, and covers new Disney movies that appear in theaters through the end of 2018. That means Netflix will have the right to show Disney movies that have already come out this year, like Cars 3, as well as ones on tap for 2017, like Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
• That deal also means Netflix will eventually stream Disney movies scheduled for next year, like Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, The Incredibles 2 and the untitled “Star Wars Story” movie about Han Solo. 
• Disney says it won’t renew its current Netflix deal, which means that it will have the right to show all of its old movies on its new streaming service, as well as new ones. So films that are scheduled for release in 2019, like Toy Story 4 and a sequel to Frozen, will end up on the new service.
• That doesn’t necessarily mean that Disney’s Marvel movies, like a fourth Avengers movie, or its Lucasfilm movies, like the 9th installment of the Star Wars series, will end up on the Disney streaming service. Disney CEO Bob Iger says his company hasn’t decided whether to include those movies in its Disney-branded service, or create different services just for those properties. It’s even possible that they’ll strike a new deal to license those movies to Netflix or another streaming service, he says: “It's all in discussion.”
• It doesn’t seem likely that Disney will let someone else stream some of its most popular movies if it’s already selling a streaming service to consumers. But it’s not impossible: Disney may decide that the people who really want to pay for Disney and Pixar movies aren’t as interested in Marvel movies. And for the right price, Netflix or other streaming services will be happy stream Disney’s superhero and Star Wars movies.
• This also doesn’t affect, for now, other Disney-related content that Netflix streams, like the Marvel TV shows including Daredevil and Luke Cage.

Got it? No? Confused? Fair enough: The man who runs Disney isn’t sure, either. “It's premature to say exactly what we will do,” Iger says.

*** [9/14/17]

Bad news for Netflix: Disney CEO Bob Iger now says that Disney’s forthcoming streaming service, which is set to debut in late 2019, will exclusively get Star Wars and Marvel movies. This is in addition to Pixar and Disney studio films, which were the content focus of the service when it was initially announced.

The addition of Marvel and Star Wars movies coming exclusively to the app (via CNBC) along with Disney’s television library, will make for a very deep well of content for the own-brand subscription streaming offering. This will be very useful in helping to attract subscribers who might be hesitant about putting down yet another recurring financial commitment with the growing selection of over-the-top streaming offerings.