Comment on FDA approves cure for sickle cell disease, the first treatment to use CRISPR
Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
From what I saw elsewhere, the cost of the CRISPR treatment is roughly 2 million dollars and another way to implement the cure is via a modified flu virus. That version is roughly 3 million.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If only we knew what the real costs of treatment are, not the bullshit prices the industry decides they’ll say it is and then negotiate a barely more realistic real cost with insurance companies.
Guess we’ll have to wait until this is approved in other countries for a real answer.
themurphy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Hard to know the price in other countries when it’s free, eh?
krellor@kbin.social 11 months ago
Just because they don't issue a bill doesn't mean they don't track costs. They track labor, labor rates, and consumables.
That said, this particular treatment is very involved. They harvest cells over multiple periods, send them to a lab to be modified, and when they are ready they do chemotherapy to kill your immune system, then do a bone marrow transplant to introduce the modified cells, and then you have to be in isolation in a hospital until your immune system comes back. Even the best facilities are saying they can only do 5-10 of these per year.
Pretty crazy.
Flipper@feddit.de 11 months ago
It’s also wild that the first step of the treatment is chemotherapy.
thoughtorgan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s actually not expensive just because. They don’t manufacture this stuff in a pill packing plant with an automated machine that just churns this out.
Cell therapy takes blood from a patient and manufacturers with it to make the drug. It’s made manually by a team of people for a specific patient. The material costs alone are a quarter of the price in most cases.
Cell therapy ain’t cheap.
j4yt33@feddit.de 11 months ago
It’s tricky because the money, time and opportunity cost gone into development, testing and the approval process are also priced into this. Plus the fact that this needs to not only break even but make some money plus the fact that this won’t be relevant for a huge market I think (not sure how prevalent SCD is). So it’s an outrageous price but probably not just plucked out of thin air
drahardja@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is why pharma research should be publicly funded, and the results go directly into public domain. We will save so much money and lives in the long run that way.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 11 months ago
A LOT of pharma research gets significant public funding. They then patent it and privatize the profits. Then spending millions on advertising.
Then they try and justify pricing from the total cost of not only development, but also advertising budgets, while avoiding any mention of where the actual development funding came from in the first place.
That’s not for everything, but it’s a large enough number of drugs and treatments that the entire industry is based on bullshit.
cynar@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The bigger one is to decouple development from manufacturing.
Development should be done on a bounty type system. Both countries and individual groups can put money into bounties.
Once the bounty is claimed, then the drug is effectively free for all to produce. This lets us leverage capitalism to push prices down.
This would reshape drug development from max money, to most needed.
RatherBeMTB@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
That’s bullshit! The most advanced technology ever developed by mankind and the most expensive to develop is AI. And I can pay Open AI 20 bucks a month to hire what is basically a human in the 10th too percentile for 20 bucks.
The only difference is the elasticity of the market. If I need your fucking drug and you have a patent then I will have to give you all I have so I don’t die.
The healthcare system in the US is just fucked up.
j4yt33@feddit.de 11 months ago
You have no idea how any of that works do you