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.
FDA approves cure for sickle cell disease, the first treatment to use CRISPR
Submitted 11 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Tylerdurdon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
Guess we’ll have to wait until this is approved in other countries for a real answer.
Hard to know the price in other countries when it’s free, eh?
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
set_secret@lemmy.world 11 months ago
wow this is huge for anyone with sickle cell that lives in a country that has universal healthcare. Other countries I guess it’s great for super rich people.
chitak166@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I wonder why it’s so expensive.
SCB@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Emergent tech always starts out very expensive.
Consider that the phone you probably posted this on is more powerful than the first computers, which were several orders of magnitude larger and more expensive.
chitak166@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yeah, great points. Economies of scale have not kicked in, and I’m sure there are plenty of inefficiencies with the technologies they’re currently using.
thoughtorgan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Manufacturing costs alone are insane. I work in biopharma, specifically manufacturing.
Most of these drugs you see on headlines are made from the blood of the patient. You can’t mass produce that.
SoleInvictus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You can’t mass produce that.
Challenge accepted.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 11 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a powerful treatment for sickle cell disease, a devastating illness that affects more than 100,000 Americans, the majority of whom are Black.
In April 2021, Morning joined the clinical trial at Sarah Cannon Research Institute and HCA Healthcare’s The Children’s Hospital at TriStar Centennial in Nashville, Tennessee, a decision she initially regretted.
Dr. Haydar Frangoul, medical director of pediatric hematology-oncology for the Sarah Cannon Research Institute, said he is hopeful the therapy will provide relief to more patients.
Dr. Nicole Verdun, director of the Office of Therapeutic Products in the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said Lyfgenia was given the warning after two patients who got the therapy in a clinical trial died from a form of leukemia.
It’s unclear whether the gene therapy itself or another part of the treatment process, such as the chemotherapy, caused the cancer, but Verdun said the agency thought the deaths “rose to the level of a black-box warning.”
Christopher Vega, 31, from Allentown, Pennsylvania, said the possibility of long-term effects aren’t a concern for him; he is happy to be living a life free of chronic pain.
The original article contains 1,565 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
themurphy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Alright real question here. I’ve noticed after I came on reddit and Lemmy, something I believe I’ve only seen in American media.
Why is it so important to mention people’s skin colour all the time? This affects 100.000 Americans, and then they mention most are black?!
Why does that matter? I can’t figure out why on earth they want to divide people up in race like that, like they are a different people. A different kind of Americans.
It’s not hard to figure out why Americans are so divided, if they get talked about like a different group of people based on skin colour.
IanAtCambio@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Because being black isn’t just a skin color. It also includes a genetic predisposition to this disease.
TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 11 months ago
For one, it’s a genetic disorder that’s linked to ancestry.
For another, there’s a huge social-justice issue around race in the US. Black people are hugely overrepresented in prisons, and there are vast, ingrained and systemic prejudices and barriers to equality everywhere you look.
This is why ferinstance efforts to enforce photo-ID requirements for voting would significantly disenfranchise Black voters (which is the real reason conservatives keep trying to push for it), because a disproportionate percentage of Black people simply don’t have the means to obtain such ID - vastly more than the number of white people in a similar position.
Take centuries of explicitly racist law and policy directly excluding and oppressing Black people. Wind back the explicit racism over the last handful of decades, but quietly replace it with exclusion and oppression based on the socieconomic disparity thus created. Now you can claim to have a colourblind legal/etc system, yet continue to preserve and promote disadvantage that ends up depending on race.
And because social mobility is an absolute joke over there (as it is in most places, tbh), then the opportunities and resources available to you will depend heavily and primarily on the opportunities and resources available to your family and community for many generations back. There’s not just generational wealth to deal with, but generational influence and networking; you can’t be in with the Right People unless your parents were, and neither could they, rinse and repeat. And when the Right People instantly dismiss you on sight, or even just by seeing your name, then you’re fucked.
So when someone says that a hundred thousand people in the US have a crippling and debilitating disease, and the great majority are Black - yeah, it means something. It means that a chunk of the population are getting a raw deal on top of the shit sandwich they’ve been handed just by being born, and that this is just one more thing that, for the most part, white people don’t have to care about. And because the fucked up healthcare system in the US is so profit-driven, that means there’s going to be vastly less done about it than if it were equally spread across demographics.
ThoGot@lemm.ee 11 months ago
I’m wondering how such a treatment will be handled in countries with a high malaria prevalence
notapantsday@feddit.de 11 months ago
There’s a new, more effective malaria vaccine coming out right now:
ThoGot@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Sweet
fuzzywombat@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Here is an NPR article on this.
npr.org/…/fda-approves-first-gene-editing-treatme…
This seems like a really big deal. The obvious downside is the cost but hopefully that will come down over time.