Two Infants Treated with Universal Immune Cells Have Their Cancer Vanish

Post by earthly10x » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 7:08 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #49

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #5

"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…

> Is author serious with this statement? Whether or not this author is serious, there are many people who are deadly serious about this sort of thing. It's one of the main reasons that, for example, marijuana has been kept illegal despite the overwhelming evidence that it is less dangerous than either alcohol or cigarettes: legalizing pot is bad for established business interests. It's the reason that credit card tra…

Post by esalazar » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 7:10 PM UTC

gt565k wrote: post #2

'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…

Post by vkou » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 7:22 PM UTC

nsgi wrote: post #30

mediocrejoker wrote: post #11

> “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?

The cost of $4,000 doesn't take into account R&D costs, which must be recuperated in the drug's price.

Post by Shivetya » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 7:36 PM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #23

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #5

"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 hardly think a treatment costing $4000/dose to manufacture is inexpensive.

Post by gozur88 » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 7:40 PM UTC

omegaworks wrote: post #24

L_Rahman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can explain the first quote. 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 differ…

Private insurers are too fragmented and small to negotiate a reasonable price for treatment. They lack the leverage that something like a national single-payer system would have.