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Comment by prog_1 | Hacker News Reader

not "war on cancer" and not "we" winning. It's pharma finding ways how to profit from rare treatment successes of few rare disease types. Majority, and by majority i mean over 80%, of patients and cancer types are still treated with bogstandard chemo+radio+surgery. Individualized treatment plans using checkpoint inhibitor combinations, biotech therapies, etc are for few select individuals with A LOT of money.

how do i know? i work in precision oncology for a decade plus

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I think perspective is important here.

I'm alive because pharma developed an expensive drug that, at the time I got it, was only administered to 42 others before me.

I was a single person working my first job out of college with Blue Cross Blue Shield and got the best I think was available.

You might be jaded after working so long in a difficult industry; the medical research/pharma work done matters to the patients who receive it and get another decade+ of good life.

im glad for you and every single patient that benefits from something i work on. From the public health angle of most eu countries investment into novel cancer treatments makes a lot less sense that improving prevention.

> Individualized treatment plans using checkpoint inhibitor combinations, biotech therapies, etc are for few select individuals with A LOT of money.

This is the first step in the commoditization of any new treatment, no? Initially expensive but that creates competition to bring the price down.

[Maybe not in the US though because the customer cannot select their supplier]

You may check Europe. I can assure you that patients getting PD-1 inhibitors etc. while if I am not mistaken at least in part recruited for clinical trials pay zilch, nada for the drugs there are taking (in Spain).

I don't know... Advancements like Keytruda are huge. And it will be off patent soon. And there are over 1500 active CAR-T clinical trials going on as we speak.

Oh don't you worry some pharmabro will change (edit: will pay someone actually smart to change) a single atom within a single molecule of the antibody, or however the fuck they do it, and they'll re-patent all of the derivatives, and nobody will make the off-patent version of pembrolizumab due to drug companies bribing benefit managers to not cover the off-patent versions, the fact that you can't charge $150k/yr for it, and gentlemen's agreements between drug manufacturers to not harsh anyone's vibe.

If we're lucky congress won't be bribed, I mean lobbied for the sake of safety, into criminalizing its importation.

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