The myriad horrors of the US healthcare system have spawned generations of medical tourism from the wealthiest country on Earth to the periphery: Cuba, Mexico, Costa Rica, Canada, Turkey, and Thailand, to name just a few.
Now, Shanghai is quickly rising as one of the top destinations for cancer patients, as China’s biotech sector has spun an experimental treatment developed in the US into a standalone industry.
New reporting by the Wall Street Journal took a look at this fast-growth industry, centered around chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T for short.
CAR-T is essentially a personalized form of immunotherapy, in which a patient’s own white blood cells are engineered to identify and attack specific proteins found in cancer cells. Though the process was first developed by US biotech giants, their inability — or unwillingness — to lower the cost and increase supply of the treatment has led to shortages throughout the country.
