21–30 of 79 posts
>They cost more than $100,000 a year, can have serious side effects and help only some patients, generally fewer than half. Fuck you and the fuck the US healthcare system. Daddy or mama gets to live a few more years, but it will put the family into lifelong debt. I'll say it again, fuck you.
>They cost more than $100,000 a year, can have serious side effects and help only some patients, generally fewer than half. Fuck you and the fuck the US healthcare system. Daddy or mama gets to live a few more years, but it will put the family into lifelong debt. I'll say it again, fuck you.
The prohibitively expensive nature of any immunotherapy leaves me profoundly skeptical of its practical usefulness. $100,000/year? That's more than twice the median income in this country. Is it simply that expensive to get mabs from animals, is drug development disgustingly expensive, or is there unbounded greed in pharmaceutical companies?
PhDs that have dedicated their lives to specializing in specific cancers, failed drugs, research that leads nowhere, failed clinical trials because of XYZ. It's all highly specialized. And if done with a rigorous protocol, it's all expensive. You're not doing a lifetime of cancer research in hopes that you earn an average salary. For the company, if you finally get somewhere with a drug that is affective, you have to…
Looking at just research and eliminating patent dogging efforts, Drug companies don't pay for nearly as much research as you might think.
The prohibitively expensive nature of any immunotherapy leaves me profoundly skeptical of its practical usefulness. $100,000/year? That's more than twice the median income in this country. Is it simply that expensive to get mabs from animals, is drug development disgustingly expensive, or is there unbounded greed in pharmaceutical companies?
if you don’t have health insurance, your floor for “prohibitively expensive” is probably way lower than this already.
>They cost more than $100,000 a year, can have serious side effects and help only some patients, generally fewer than half. Fuck you and the fuck the US healthcare system. Daddy or mama gets to live a few more years, but it will put the family into lifelong debt. I'll say it again, fuck you.
Could it become cheaper in the future?
The prohibitively expensive nature of any immunotherapy leaves me profoundly skeptical of its practical usefulness. $100,000/year? That's more than twice the median income in this country. Is it simply that expensive to get mabs from animals, is drug development disgustingly expensive, or is there unbounded greed in pharmaceutical companies?
PhDs that have dedicated their lives to specializing in specific cancers, failed drugs, research that leads nowhere, failed clinical trials because of XYZ. It's all highly specialized. And if done with a rigorous protocol, it's all expensive. You're not doing a lifetime of cancer research in hopes that you earn an average salary. For the company, if you finally get somewhere with a drug that is affective, you have to…
Taxes?
>They cost more than $100,000 a year, can have serious side effects and help only some patients, generally fewer than half. Fuck you and the fuck the US healthcare system. Daddy or mama gets to live a few more years, but it will put the family into lifelong debt. I'll say it again, fuck you.
...and your solution is what?
Someone has cancer and their kids are wanting the treatment (of course, it's false hope, we don't want daddy to die) without realizing what they are asking for (lifelong debt). So in addition to cancer, the patient has to grapple with that shit. Anyone with a little financial sense would probably take death, but now they have to explain that to their families why they are denying the treatment (daddy doesn't want to be with us / daddy wants to die?).
Disgusting what this country has become.
I’m now 5.5 years post-treatment with immunotherapy for Stage IV melanoma and have had no evidence of disease for over four years. When immunotherapy works, it can be impressive. For me, my treatment (adoptive cell therapy using tumor infiltrating lymphocytes) used my own white blood cells (130 billion in lab-selected and expanded form) to overwhelm the mutated cancer cells. It was a one-time treatment (over 3-4 week…
There is a host of bio-tech startups following this initial wave - with two main goals:
1., Improve the treatments to become 100% cures
2., Lower the price
This is very similar to tech and, say, the storage space. Went from 100k for a few GBs to peanuts for TBs on AWS pretty quickly. That's what momentum in a crowded space will do.
Healthcare systems around the globe will have to figure out the effects of this, similar to autonomous driving. And it is not just simple cost of treatment.
What if cancer becomes curable? What to do with all the cancer wards? Specialists in Oncology? Chemo/Radio/Surgery? The spider-web effect here is gigantic.
Sticker price for the drug vs. long term treatment (multiple chemo rounds, surgery, palliative care) if its 100k is NOTHING.
The prohibitively expensive nature of any immunotherapy leaves me profoundly skeptical of its practical usefulness. $100,000/year? That's more than twice the median income in this country. Is it simply that expensive to get mabs from animals, is drug development disgustingly expensive, or is there unbounded greed in pharmaceutical companies?