41–50 of 137 posts
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To cure cancer and live? Seems pretty cheap to me.
Some people don't have $4000 so it's not a matter of deciding whether parting with that much money is worthwhile. And the status of a lot of people's health insurance is suddenly up in the air.
But then those people wouldn't be able to afford other treatments either.
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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 they may evolve from parent to child, so what works for one generation may be less effective on following ones.
"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.
> “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?
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…
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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…
Mostly profit to pay back the investors for billions of dollars in research and development, and baked in liability insurance. Some of it also goes to pay for the R&D of other drugs that never make it to market.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...
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I hardly think a treatment costing $4000/dose to manufacture is inexpensive.
How much were the first large-screen LCDs? How much are they now?
> 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…
However, I expect a lot is known about chemo-only survival rates so it may not even be a legit criticism as you can compare the combination survival rate to the baseline. That said, n=2 is too small to draw conclusions.
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Standard approach would likely be to choose a population of patients, randomize them between "chemo" and "chemo+immune" treatment groups, and then test for a significant difference in the metric of choice such as response rate or progression-free survival. The graphical analysis of these data is often done using Kaplan-Meier curves ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimator )
So, can't simple take some (or all) other children who are going through "just chemo" in any other hospital, or even in the same hospital? I think there are plenty of children in the world that are doing (suffering?) chemo everyday.
"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…
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 transactions cost 2-3% when the technology to process payments for an order of magnitude less has existed for years. It's the reason "low fat" became a thing when sugar is actually much worse. It's reason you can't buy an open-source mobile phone. I could go on and on.
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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.
The full paper states that they did this prior to even phase I of clinical trials: 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 et…