Technology does tend to get cheaper over time, though not always.
Do you think this treatment could reach $30.000 in 2,5,10,15 years? And $300 in another 10,20,50 more years?
For the pharma research companies to be profitable, they need to recoup the above costs on the limited number of cancer patients there are.
For a widely applicable technology like CAR-T, if you can figure out how to distribute the costs over multiple types of cancers, you could have a much larger pool of patients to distribute the cost over, such that the marginal cost of production is a more meaningful component of the cost to patient/insurer.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5559086/
https://www.wired.com/story/drug-research-pricing/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/higher-drug-prices-support-prof...
A study in germany predicts a cost of around 30k if universities or other bigger health care providers create the CAR-T cells in their own labs.
What technology didn't get cheaper?
I'm unaware of anything else under $20k, although the Ford Maverick is impressively reasonable at $21k.
What do do when you can't create something more cheaply, or of a higher quality? Curve some edges, strap a layer of chrome on it, and market it endlessly to get people to buy the fundamentally identical product over and over and over again. Progress!
"Oh god, I can't believe you're still driving a 1916 - that's soooo last year."
[1] - https://modeltfordfix.com/the-1916-model-t-ford/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Planned_obsolescence#History
Not too much like a modern car to compare, though. Still no electric starting, and not a lot of capacity, creature comforts, or speed. Time between major overhauls was ~15,000 miles. Overall lifespan of the car was estimated as 100,000.
> What do do when you can't create something more cheaply, or of a higher quality? Curve some edges, strap a layer of chrome on it, and market it endlessly to get people to buy the fundamentally identical product over and over and over again. Progress!
When we're comparing to vehicles with anything like modern speeds and capacities,... average vehicle age / longevity is higher than its ever been. (It's a bit more difficult to compare before the mid-1960s because vehicles were rebuilt and overhauled so much before then...)
I'm just saying: there's not really any cars like a model T anymore. Not just because of increased technology, but because of improved underlying technology: customers expect more (volume, mass capacity, interior comforts, ancillary features, speed, etc) and that increases cost.
We could probably make something a lot like a model T pretty cheaply still, if there were a big market for it.
A new, average midsize new car in 1985 was approximately $11,000. (~$30,500 after inflation).
A new, average midsize sedan is now approximately $31,886.
In 1927 Model A Ford in the Town Car configuration was $1400-- this is like $24,000 now, but of course, it's a lot less car than a modern midsize.
IMO, car pricing hasn't changed much.
I think the point is that technology that has to constantly progress to stay relevant doesn’t stay cheap.
We haven't seen a reduction in space insurance premiums of any particularly large magnitude which I would expect if the costs of launching satellites into space had been substantially reduced.
Insulin.
Though plain old insulin is actually pretty cheap. It's the fancy stuff that's really expensive.
There's still a market for dedicated calculators. Schools don't allow students access to smartphones during tests, but calculators are fine.
For webcams we now also have eye/head/movement tracking, automatic background insertion, and other improvements (as well as added features like turning you into an animated cartoon character) although arguably those are from webcam software rather than hardware (though there are examples like the Apple Studio Display webcam which uses their neural engine hardware.)
Military hardware?
Maybe not same model but actually same plane? If it was new in the 70s it is used and much cheaper now. If it was new in the 50s, the used price in the 70s might have been lower than it is today though. That's caused by the minimum price the market defines for anything that's airworthy.
Maybe that's an investment stragtegy, buying used planes when they reach their minimum price, then keeping them, flying minimal hours to keep the engine alive, to sell 50 years later. But any potential gain will be neglected by hangar and maintenance cost.
Quantum is not at that point, and won’t be in 3 years.
Computation is also not the bottleneck of research, it's the amount of training data, see ICGC https://dcc.icgc.org for the current state of the art.
Remember that each tumor has 3 billion base pairs (A,C,G,T), each of which can be duplicated, deleted, mutated. It can also be affected by methylation. Expression of the genes comprised by these base pairs is also affected by the micro-environment of the cell. Any machine learning model will have far to many parameters for far to few observations, to pick the rare drug that can cure stage 4 cancer (assuming it even exists) out of millions of possible chemical compounds.