Breyanzi arrives on the market roughly three years after the U.S. approvals in lymphoma of Yescarta and Kymriah, sold respectively by Gilead and Novartis.

Over that span, physicians have grown more comfortable prescribing the highly complex engineered cell therapies, and both companies have learned hard lessons about the difficulties in producing and delivering them. But neither treatment is a big seller, their use mostly confined to small groups of blood cancer patients who have exhausted other options.

With Breyanzi, Bristol Myers aims to convince doctors its treatment is safer than its competitors, but similarly effective at destroying the malignant B cells that proliferate throughout patients’ lymph nodes and bone marrow. But doing so may be a tall order, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic makes the arduous process of administering treatment in hospitals more difficult.

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