The Washington Post has an article about a new cancer treatment.

When a patient is treated under the Novartis process, T cells are extracted from a patient’s blood, frozen and sent to the company’s plant in Morris Plains, N.J. There, the cells are genetically modified to attack the cancer, expanded in number, refrozen and shipped back to the patient for infusion.

Once inside the body, the cells multiply exponentially and go hunting for the CD19 protein, which appears on a kind of white blood cell that can give rise to diseases, such as leukemia and lymphoma. The turnaround time for manufacturing the therapy, called “vein-to-vein” time, will be an estimated 22 days, Novartis officials told the committee Wednesday.

From the start of Wednesday’s meeting, committee members made clear that they were not concerned about the treatment’s efficacy, which has been well established — 83 percent of patients went into remission in the pivotal Novartis trial.