11–20 of 137 posts
> Either type of treatment is likely to cost insurers half a million dollars or more if they reach the market.
Can someone more familiar with the pharmaceutical industry explain this?
It's hard to cure cancer definitely because cancer cells will always be trying to out-evolve any treatment. Anything that quickly kills 99% of cells, unfortunately, lets them select for survival traits really fast.
However, given that cancer cells do not evolve between individuals (as opposed to bacteria and virii), if we are to find a efficient immunological treatment it's going to stay efficient. If anything, we will evolve for our cancers to respond better to it.
'Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers said that because the London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who collaborates with Novartis. “It would be great if it wor…
"The ready-made approach could pose a challenge to companies including Juno Therapeutics and Novartis, each of which has spent tens of millions of dollars pioneering treatments that require collecting a patient’s own blood cells, engineering them, and then re-infusing them." Is author serious with this statement? Two kids lives were saved with a potentially inexpensive technique and the author think's this point is r…
I don't see it as the author complaining about the danger to the companies but merely stating it. It's not only just OK, but also necessary to throw light on this.
'Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers said that because the London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who collaborates with Novartis. “It would be great if it wor…
It's hard to cure cancer definitely because cancer cells will always be trying to out-evolve any treatment. Anything that quickly kills 99% of cells, unfortunately, lets them select for survival traits really fast.
However, given that cancer cells do not evolve between individuals (as opposed to bacteria and virii), if we are to find a efficient immunological treatment it's going to stay efficient. If anything, we will evolve for our cancers to respond better to it.
This sounds like wishful thinking from VC who just put a lot of money into the Bespoke solution. The idea of immunotherapy is that your injecting cells that can attack the cancer. What does it matter it it's your own cells especially when the cost is an order of magnitude bigger.
> Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers said that because the London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. Could someone explain what the process for proving it would be in this case? I presume some kind of animal testing? Seems pretty immoral to give someone a wildcard treatment and not back it up with so…
Give both the normal treatment and (new thing), and compare it to just the normal treatment and see which group has better outcomes. For serious issues you can stop the trial early and give it to everyone if it's shown to be a dramatic improvement.
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/374/eaaj2013.full
Therapy was provided for two infants under the UK. special license arrangements after institutional ethical reviews.
Named-patient, open-label, nonblinded, compassionate therapy was undertaken in two infants ahead of planned phase 1 clinical trials.
I guess the proceedings of the ethical reviews would be quite interesting.
> “We estimate the cost to manufacture a dose would be about $4,000,” she says. That’s compared to a cost of around $50,000 to alter a patient’s cells and return them. > Either type of treatment is likely to cost insurers half a million dollars or more if they reach the market. Can someone more familiar with the pharmaceutical industry explain this?
In a universal donor scenario, the T-cells are engineered, error corrected and tested once. From there, they can be multiplied pretty cheaply. Most of the cost is in the initial engineering.
In a patient cell scenario, each individual patient's cells must be engineered, tested and delivered. This is obviously much more expensive.
A very crude computer science analogy would be the difference between scaling up a load balanced application relative to adding a new server from bare metal without automated scripts.
Why the treatment would cost half a millions dollars at the market is outside of my purview, so I'm eager to get an explanation as well.
'Although the cases drew wide media attention in Britain, some researchers said that because the London team also gave the children standard chemotherapy, they failed to show the cell treatment actually cured the kids. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” says Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who collaborates with Novartis. “It would be great if it wor…