In 2010, Josh Feldman was on his honeymoon -- a globe-spanning trip that at one point involved swimming with humpback whales -- when he noticed a "Garbanzo-sized" lump on the back of his neck. It turned out to be lymphoma, which worsened even as he cycled through treatments: chemotherapy, the immunotherapy Opdivo, a targeted drug called Zydelig. What actually worked for the 55-year-old photographer was a radical treatment in which his own white blood cells were genetically re-engineered to kill his cancer. Compared to the other drugs, it was "a walk in the park," he said earlier this year while overlooking a mango tree on his property. "I'd like to see it become first-line therapy," he said. In September, 15 months after his treatment, he was still in remission. 
 
 That's still a long way away. But the treatment Feldman received was just approved by the Food and Drug Administration under the brand name Yescarta, with a bracing price tag: $373,000 per patient. That doesn't include the costs of dealing Yescarta's side effects, which include life-threatening fevers triggered by the immune response the therapy creates that can mean weeks in the hospital, or other drugs patients must receive. 
 
 FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, himself a cancer survivor, called Yescarta "another milestone in the development of a whole new scientific paradigm." David Maloney, a physician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, had this to say about Yescarta's approval in a prepared statement: "There will likely be thousands of lives saved in the next few years because of it." Louis DeGennaro, the chief executive of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, which helped fund Yescarta's development, wrote in an email blast that "many patients who were out of treatment options are now in remission" because of experimental studies of the drug. 
 
 It's no surprise that the excitement comes at a high economic price. In August, the treatment's developer, Kite Pharmaceuticals, was purchased by biotech giant Gilead Pharmaceuticals for $11.9 billion, a price which made Kite founder and chief executive Arie Belldegrun's shares worth some $600 million. The process of making the drug is laborious and expensive. But critics are likely to counter that much of the work of developing the drug was done by the National Cancer Institute, by Steven Rosenberg, a researcher there. 
 
 Yescarta is the second treatment of its kind, called a Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell, or CAR-T, for the particular genetic modifications made to white cells. The first, Kymriah, for Novartis, was addressed at children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a small group of patients. Yescarta is being approved for a much larger population. About 24,000 Americans are diagnosed with diffuse large-cell b-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), the variety Yescarta treats, every year. 
 
 Novartis priced Kymriah at $475,000, which makes Kite's price sound significantly lower. But Novartis said it is offering insurance companies a unique, "value-based" pricing structure, in which it only pays for those patients who go into remission withing three months. For Novartis' treatment in DLBCL, that's only 45% of patients, which means at the $475,000 price, Novartis would only be receiving about $200,000 per patient. (Novartis has not said how it will price in DLBCL). 
 
 In patients' whose disease did not shrink after chemotherapy, Yescarta shrank tumors 70% of the time. More impressively, 51% went into complete remission, meaning their cancer was undetectable. The severe fever and neurological side effects led the FDA to give the treatment a boxed warning, its most severe. 
 
 Kite also boasts about its ability to manufacture individual CAR-T cells for each patient. "Our manufacturing success rate was 99% and the turnaround had a median of 17 days," said David Chang, Kite's chief scientific officer. "I haven’t anything close to that coming from Novartis." 
 
 In an interview conducted before the approval, Chang also had a response for critics who point to the role that the NCI and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society had in developing Yescarta as an argument that it should cost less. He says that people don't have enough appreciation of the difficult of moving from government-sponsored research to an approved, manufactured product. 
 
 "Look," Chang said, "Government is not in the business of making and commercializing a drug. They are more in the business of creating the innovation. And innovation has to be matched with the right private company to make sure all the right necessary steps are done. This is the underlying premise of how the credo is set. Both for the government the private sector and ultimately for the patients." 
 
 Chang says Kite (now Gilead) is developing CAR-T treatments for other cancers. It will test a CAR-T against a target called BCMA in multiple myeloma, another targeted against cancers caused by the human papilloma virus, and a third against MAGE3, hoping to to move the technology beyond cancers of the blood. "The clinical results are really, really different from anything else that proceeded that before," Chang said. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Maggie Fox 
 
 Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration have recommended approval of a new experimental, personalized cancer treatment for children with leukemia. 
 
 This last-ditch treatment, CAR-T therapy, retrains a patient’s immune system to home in on tumor cells and kill them. 
 
 Emily Whitehead with her father, Tom Whitehead. Kari Whitehead 
 
 This particular treatment, which has the tongue-twisting name tisagenlecleucel, is made by Novartis and it’s one of several being developed by drug companies that want to try to standardize the approach as much as possible so it can be patented and licensed. 
 
 If the FDA approves the approach, it would be limited to a small group — children and young adults under the age of 25 with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia that have relapsed despite chemotherapy. 
 
 “The sparkle in her eyes returned.” 
 
 Dr. Samit Hirawat of Novartis said 75 percent of patients with recurrent leukemia despite treatment were still cancer-free six months after getting the CAR-T treatment. 
 
 It’s not without risks – some children who received the treatment spiked fevers of as high as 107 degrees and not all of them were cured. But the parents of three children who tested the therapy, including a little girl who died, gave emotional testimony urging the committee of expert advisers to approve the treatment. 
 
 Related: New Cancer Approach Offers Hope to Those With None Left 
 
 They included Tom Whitehead whose then 6 year old daughter, Emily, was the first to try CAR-T at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She’s still cancer free five years later. 
 
 “We believe that when this treatment is approved it will save thousands of children’s lives around the world,” Whitehead told the meeting, his voice cracking as he looked at his daughter beside him. 
 
 “The benefits that we gained from this treatment far outweigh the risk,” he added. “She’s standing right beside me and it’s because of this treatment.” 
 
 Emily Whitehead, right, alongside her father Tom and mother Kari, was the first child with leukemia to try a new treatment for leukemia called CAR-T, developed by Novartis. Emily is now 12 and leukemia-free. The FDA is considering approval of the treatment. NBC News 
 
 Amy Kappen of Florence, Kentucky, urged approval even though the approach did not save her own daughter Sophia, who died in April. But treatment gave their daughter a few extra months of happy life, Kappen said. “The transformation from October of 2016 to December of 2016 was unbelievable,” she told the committee. 
 
 “The sparkle in her eyes returned.” 
 
 Kappen said while her daughter wasn’t saved, she was sure CAR-T could help others. “Our children deserve this chance,” she said. 
 
 The alternatives, the parents all testified, were more rounds of toxic chemotherapy, or gruelling bone-marrow transplants. Chemo had already left Connor McMahon of Atlanta sterile, his father Don McMahon testified. Connor, now 16, is one of CAR-T's success stories. 
 
 CAR-T stands for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy. It involves taking a samples of immune cells called T-cells from a patient, genetically engineering them, and putting them back in to fight the cancer. 
 
 It will be difficult to standardize, said Dr. Wilson Bryan, who directs the FDA office that oversees these types of treatments. 
 
 Related: CAR-T has surprising success against multiple myeloma 
 
 “Particularly, we are concerned that the same safety and benefit seen in clinical trials may not translate into routine use. This is a complex product,” Bryan said in opening the meeting. 
 
 FDA’s clinical reviewer, Dr. Maura O’ Leary, noted that the treatment causes an inflammatory collapse called a cytokine storm, a sometimes deadly reaction, that can also cause nerve damage. Dr. Megan Polanin of the National Center for Health Research, a think-tank, said she was worried that most of the patients had only been followed for a few months. 
 
 But the FDA advisers did not seem very concerned about the roadblocks and the meeting finished with a unanimous yes vote more than an hour ahead of schedule. 
 
 Even competitors urged approval. 
 
 “I will be Novartis’ biggest cheerleader today,” said Dr. Arie Belldegrun, CEO of Kite Pharmaceutical, which makes a rival treatment also under FDA consideration. 
 
 Related: Gene-Editing Approach Treats Baby's Leukemia 
 
 “I am amused by the horse-race metaphors that are used to frame the various companies developing CAR-T therapies. Today is not about business or competition,” Belldegrun said in a statement. 
 
 “Today is about advancing an exciting technology that has the potential to transform cancer treatment.” 
 
 Juno Therapeutics abandoned its CAR-T product in March after five people died during testing.
– The Food and Drug Administration has approved a second "living drug" to fight cancer—a personalized treatment that alters a patient's own cells to turn them into cancer-killers. The new "CAR T-cell therapy" has been approved for non-Hodkins lymphoma patients with few other treatment options, a group that could number around 3,500 per year, the Washington Post reports. But the innovative therapy won't come cheap: Forbes reports that the cost will be $373,000 per patient, not including the cost of treating side effects that could include dangerous fevers. A similar treatment approved for leukemia in July costs $475,000 per patient. Doctors believe the new treatment, produced by Kite Pharma under the brand name Yescarta, could save thousands of lives, the New York Times reports. In the study that led to FDA approval, 54% of 101 patients went into complete remission, and 39% of the 101 were still in remission an average of 8.7 months later. "Today marks another milestone in the development of a whole new scientific paradigm for the treatment of serious diseases," FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement. "In just several decades, gene therapy has gone from being a promising concept to a practical solution to deadly and largely untreatable forms of cancer." (The fight against breast cancer is also making progress.)