Hope vs Hype: Managing Patient Expectations for CAR T-Cell Therapy
Imagine a young adult male in his late 20s picks up his cell phone and calls his mother. Overtly emotional and on the verge of releasing a full-out flow of tears, the young man says to the voice at the other end of the line, “Mom, there’s hope.”
It’s enough to make an onlooker get emotional themselves, and it comes at the end of what the viewer knows is a 60-second commercial from Penn Medicine, during which a narrator touts the FDA’s approval of CAR T-cell therapy as “one of the most important breakthroughs in the fight against cancer, and this is just the beginning.”
