Wow, $1mm to save a life. (This math works in the rich world.)
I really wish I could see a transparent breakdown of that number. How much of that is the amortized cost of R&D, marketing costs, salaries for the executives and management, etc? How much of it is actual production costs, and what do those look like (raw materials, equipment, labor)? How much of it is profit? What else could be baked into that price?
Does anybody here know of any publicly available reports that detail cost breakdowns for pharmaceuticals like this?
but: if it doesn’t work, sometimes you get your money back! (novartis has never had to pay out)
https://www.fastcompany.com/40461214/how-novartis-is-defendi...
This is not to mention how much of this tech could be shared with other treatments for other diseases.
I had Twinrix (Hep A+B combo vaccine) at least twice because I'd forgotten I'd had it, and only found out later when I put my medical notes into a spreadsheet.
Just had to ask and the NHS did it for free.
It’s absolutely worth it if you can afford it, which the rich world can. But personalised medicine forces us to face, in stark and dollarised terms, the inequity of healthcare access across the world.
Personalised medicine has high cost floors. The factors which would enable a triple order-of-magnitude reduction in its cost would sooner realise massive savings elsewhere, which means it’s unlikely a niche cancer treatment would be prioritised.
I'm fine with """paying $1M dollars""" via a monthly bill of $50 or whatever until I die and the rest of the debt evaporates.
Which is a rich-world perk. (That, to be clear, we absolutely should offer our people.)
Side note: do you have a link to more on this law? Currently dealing with an uninsured friend for whom we’re pooling resources for a medical treatment.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-repor...
Note that this is for lower-income households
Especially if it might not ultimately work.
That said, I appreciate that costs will go down over time--even if only somewhat, if the author is correct.
The worst case scenario is it works but you die in a car crash anyway.
It is entirely possible that 30 years from now, the same therapy will cost 1000 USD per dose, with most of the expensive stuff automated away.
There are lots of tumor "driver mutations" that are causative and occur in lots and lots of patients. These would make great targets for a vaccine like this, in theory.
But - Tumors have to evade the immune system in order to gain a foothold. (We have all had many cancerous cells that were cleared away without anyone ever knowing!). If a mutation is particularly good at activating the immune system, it's unlikely to survive long enough to cause cancer. So one of the features that a mutation has to have in order to become a driver is that it's bad at being recognized by the immune system! That means the most common mutations that we'd like to target with cheap, mass-produced vaccines may not work very well.
There's some evidence on both sides at this point, with lots more data being collected, but it's certainly something that us folks researching the problem are keenly following!