FASTER, PLEASE: Cancer cell therapies could be approved next year: Juno, Kite Pharma.

A new wave of experimental cancer drugs that directly recruit the immune system’s powerful T cells could begin reaching patients next year, according to companies presenting new data at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

In interviews with Reuters, Kite Pharma Inc and Juno Therapeutics Inc both said they could receive initial regulatory approvals next year for a type of immunotherapy treatment known as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies.

CAR-T therapies involve a complicated process of extracting immune system T cells from an individual patient, altering their DNA to sharpen their ability to spot and kill cancer cells, and infusing them back into the same patient.

The technique is being tested against a range of different cancer types, but first in blood cancers. Kite aims to file this year for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of its therapy, KTE-C19, for patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), according to Chief Medical Officer David Chang.

Like I said, faster, please.