How Can Cellular Therapies Become More Affordable Across the World?

According to Syed Osman Ali Ahmed, MBBS, BSc (Hons), MRCP, FRCPath, CCT, there are several obstacles in the way of advancing the adoption of cellular therapies in lower- and middle-income countries. These obstacles include cost, production capabilities, waiting times, and the reagents of CAR-T cells.

Surrounding the 2025 Immune Cell Effector Therapy (ICE-T) Congress, Ahmed, an attending physician at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Saudi Arabia, spoke with CancerNetwork® about his presentation titled “Global Experience with Cellular Therapeutics”.

First, Ahmed stated that the marketed price of cellular therapy is currently higher than the actual cost of marketing the therapy across the world. This problem can be addressed by implementing decentralized point-of-care manufacturing in a closed system. Ahmed noted that, with this method, the costs are about 20% to 30% of the cost of the commercial product. With this, the issue of scale arises, however.

India is one example of a country that has been able to make CAR T-cell therapies relatively more affordable, at a cost of $25,000 to $50,000, which he attributed to various factors, such as labor costs and material costs. He described how government subsidies represented another method of making these therapies more affordable.

Transcript:

There are a number of strategies to address [obstacles to adopting cellular therapy in lower- and middle-income countries] now. The actual cost of manufacturing, if you break it down, is not as high as the price that’s currently marketed. There are various reasons why the costs and the pricing in the US and Europe are what they are, and it serves the market and the buying power of the payers. That can’t be translated to a lot of Asia and Africa—there are hardly any centers in Africa that are able to provide these sorts of cellular therapies at the moment—and India. For example, some of the things that could circumvent [the bottlenecks] are models, such as the decentralized manufacturing of these cellular therapies. We’ve been able to demonstrate in our institution, for example, if you do decentralized point-of-care manufacturing in a closed system, the actual costs are about 20% to 30% of the cost of a commercial product. Then, the challenge is, how do you provide that at scale, and how do you address the regulatory challenges of that so we know we can bring the cost down?

Another solution has been brought forth by what’s happened in India, for example. Colleagues in India at the Tata Memorial Hospital…and many others have been able to make CAR T-cell therapies affordable at a much lower cost—like $25,000 to $50,000. That has other reasons as well. You could talk about how the labor costs are lower, the costs of materials, the costs of renting space, et cetera. The production costs are lower. You can, in those economies, scale it down to a price that is more affordable. It’s still expensive for a lot of people, but it is, in real terms, a fraction of the cost that it is in the West and the Global North. Point-of-care manufacturing, scalable manufacturing, and bringing the cost down [can help]. The other thing is subsidizing. Governments can subsidize some of these technologies and platforms. That’s another model that can be replicated in other places. There are ways, and we think with time, costs can come down. The market pressures in the US and Europe may make that slightly challenging, but it’s doable.

Reference

Ahmed SO. Global experience with cellular therapeutics. Presented at the 2025 Immune Cell Effector Therapy Congress; September 27-28, 2025; Kansas City, KS.