Qartemi Cost and Access in India

There is no single official list price. When Qartemi was approved in January 2025, Immuneel Therapeutics indicated a cost of about US$60,000 per dose, reported by AABB on 29 January 2025. Indian coverage since the launch has quoted totals in the region of ₹35 lakh to ₹50 lakh at Indian centres. Each accredited centre quotes individually.

Two things about that figure matter more than its size.

First, it is a course price, not a cycle price. CAR-T is not a repeating infusion. Your own T cells are collected once, engineered over some weeks, and returned to you once. What is priced is the manufacture of a single product, for one person, that nobody else can use. It cannot be paid down in instalments the way a chemotherapy or checkpoint-inhibitor course can. So the money question has to be settled before cell collection, not during treatment.

Second, Immuneel does not publish a rupee rate card. The company has described Qartemi as priced far below CAR-T abroad, and its published media material has referred to a figure of about ₹51 lakh to ₹60 lakh. Indian news coverage has quoted lower totals. That spread is not a contradiction. Different sources are describing different things.

Four ordinary reasons explain most of the spread:

• dollar figures move with the exchange rate, so a rupee equivalent quoted in 2025 is not the rupee figure of 2026;
• some numbers describe the product alone and others describe a hospital total;
• some are expectations stated at launch rather than amounts anyone has actually paid;
• hospital charges differ from centre to centre, and the product is only one line on the bill.

The published band is a starting point for planning. Only an accredited centre’s written estimate is your number.

Only accredited cell-therapy centres. Qartemi is made by Immuneel Therapeutics at its Bengaluru facility on the Narayana Health City campus. It is supplied to hospitals that have a leukapheresis unit, a trained cell-therapy team and intensive-care support. There is no official public list of supplied centres. Ask your haematologist, or the manufacturer, which centres are currently active.

Supply lists change from month to month, so a name found on a forum or in an old news report is not a current answer. A centre that treats CAR-T patients with one product is not automatically supplied with the other. Qartemi and NexCAR19 are separate authorisations with separate supply arrangements.

Five questions settle whether a centre is the right one:

• Is this centre currently supplied with this specific product, and since when?
• How many CAR-T patients has the team treated?
• Are the apheresis unit, the cell-therapy team and the intensive-care unit all on this site?
• What does the written estimate cover, line by line?
• Is the centre empanelled for my insurer’s network or my state scheme?

Distance is the part families underestimate. This is not a day visit. The CAR-T pathway requires the patient to stay near the treating centre for weeks after infusion, with a caregiver present. If the nearest accredited centre is in another city, relocation for that period is part of the plan and part of the cost.

The product price covers manufacturing and supplying your CAR-T cells. It does not cover the treatment around them. Families who budget only for the headline figure are usually short by a wide margin. They find out after cell collection, when manufacturing has already started and the decision is hard to unwind.

Sitting around the product price are:

• Leukapheresis — the day-care procedure in which your T cells are separated out.
• Bridging treatment — treatment given while your cells are being engineered, if the disease needs controlling meanwhile.
• Lymphodepleting chemotherapy — a short course given before the infusion.
• The admission around infusion — the infusion is short; the monitoring afterwards is the reason for the stay.
• Management of side effects — cytokine release syndrome and neurological effects are recognised risks of this treatment class, managed in hospital and sometimes in intensive care.
• Staying near the centre — with a caregiver, for the weeks after infusion that the centre specifies.
• The costs nobody quotes — travel, accommodation for two people, and lost income for the caregiver as well as the patient.

The practical rule is simple. Ask the accredited centre for a written estimate covering the whole pathway, from leukapheresis to the end of the monitoring period, itemised so the product sits on its own line. An estimate showing only the therapy figure is not something you can plan around.

Affording it and being eligible for it are two different questions, and eligibility is the harder one. Qartemi holds CDSCO market authorisation from January 2025 for adults with relapsed or refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The overwhelming majority of people with cancer in India are not candidates for it at any price. That has to be said on a cost page, because cost pages are exactly where hope tends to outrun eligibility.

Qartemi is generally not an option, or is considered only with specialist caution, for people who:

• have a cancer that is not a B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma — solid tumours are outside the approved indication entirely, and that is by far the largest group;
• are under 18 — the Indian approval is for adults, and NexCAR19 is approved from age 15, so the same person can be eligible for one product and not the other;
• have a B-cell cancer whose cells do not carry CD19 on testing, since that is the target the therapy is built around;
• have not yet had, or have not exhausted, the standard lines of treatment that come before cell therapy in the pathway;
• are not well enough overall, or whose heart, lung, liver or kidney function will not tolerate lymphodepleting chemotherapy and the possibility of cytokine release syndrome;
• have an active, uncontrolled infection at the time of the planned treatment;
• are pregnant or breastfeeding, where safety data for CAR-T is not available;
• cannot arrange a caregiver and accommodation near an accredited centre for the weeks after infusion, which is a safety requirement rather than a convenience.

None of these are rules to apply to yourself from a web page, and none are reasons to rule yourself out before a specialist has looked. They are the reasons a haematologist may say no to CAR-T even when the money has been found. Only the treating team at an accredited centre, with your pathology, CD19 status, treatment history and current fitness in front of them, can answer whether Qartemi applies to you.

No single route covers a CAR-T course. Families who complete treatment almost always assemble the money from several sources at once: insurance where the policy allows it, government and state schemes, relief funds, hospital trust or charity support, any assistance programme the manufacturer is running, and family resources. Each route has its own paperwork and its own waiting time. All of them are started in parallel, at the first appointment.

Six things, all in writing, all before cell collection. What the money buys is a considered attempt, not a certainty. Qartemi’s CDSCO approval in January 2025 rested on the phase 2 IMAGINE trial run at Indian hospitals, which reported an overall response rate of 83.3% at 90 days. That is a response rate from a small single-arm study, not a survival figure and not a prediction for any individual. Once leukapheresis is done and manufacturing has started, the cost is largely committed.

1. Confirmed eligibility. That the diagnosis, CD19 status, age and prior treatment lines meet the approved indication, stated by the haematologist at the accredited centre.
2. Which centre, and its current supply. That the centre is supplied with this specific product, and how many CAR-T patients its team has treated.
3. A total written estimate. Itemised from leukapheresis to the end of monitoring, with the product on its own line.
4. The insurer’s written position. Not a phone assurance, but a written response on exclusions, sub-limits, network status and pre-authorisation.
5. Which funding applications are filed, and when. Relief funds, scheme approvals and trust support all have lead times, and a dated list keeps them from being remembered too late.
6. The plan if the money runs short mid-pathway. Far better asked in week one than in week six, and every experienced financial counsellor expects the question.

Anyone quoting a firm all-in CAR-T figure without seeing your reports, or promising a particular outcome, is not describing how this treatment works. Sourced ranges and a centre’s written estimate are the only numbers worth planning around.

CION Cancer Clinics does not provide CAR-T or any other cell therapy, and does not stock, administer or price any CAR-T product. CAR-T in India is delivered at accredited centres with apheresis facilities, cell-manufacturing logistics and the intensive monitoring the treatment requires. A referral to one of those centres is made by your treating haematologist.

What CION centres do provide is day-care immunotherapy and chemotherapy where that is the plan a treating team has arrived at, and orientation material like this page. Those are different things, and the difference matters legally as well as practically.

If you are working through the CAR-T question, the companion pages in this section cover the parts this one does not. NexCAR19 vs Qartemi: How the Two Indian CAR-T Products Compare sets the two products against each other on indication, age range and price. NexCAR19: India’s First CAR-T Therapy Explained covers the older of the two authorisations in detail. If the diagnosis is myeloma rather than lymphoma, CAR-T for Myeloma in India: Where BCMA Therapy Stands explains why a CD19 product like Qartemi does not apply. For the wider set of molecule guides, comparisons and cost pages, start from Immunotherapy Medicines Explained, and for how immunotherapy as a whole is used in Indian practice, see the immunotherapy overview.