STAT+: We’re reading about a Bristol CAR-T trial pause, Pfizer offloading a shelved candidate, and more — SkimNews
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- Bristol Myers Squibb paused trials of its CAR-T therapy for autoimmune diseases in early June after observing life-threatening side effects, notifying regulators, researchers, and patient advocacy groups.
- Novartis's parallel CAR-T autoimmune trials recorded three deaths, which along with the BMS pause only surfaced publicly after an analyst note and news reporting this week.
- The Wall Street Journal broke the story, reporting that both companies' serious safety signals had not been proactively disclosed to the public.
- The delayed transparency raises questions about how drugmakers communicate trial halts and fatal adverse events to patients and the broader medical community.
Why it matters: When two major pharma companies running similar CAR-T autoimmune trials both experience serious safety events—and neither proactively discloses them—the patients weighing enrollment in experimental cell therapies lose a critical information channel, and the broader field's safety profile becomes harder to assess in real time.
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