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> The medication was given every three weeks for six months and cost about $11,000 per dose. That’s an $88,000 treatment for the medication alone. Given the apparent success of the drug, is it expected for the price to drop as the volume of patients spike?
> The medication was given every three weeks for six months and cost about $11,000 per dose. That’s an $88,000 treatment for the medication alone. Given the apparent success of the drug, is it expected for the price to drop as the volume of patients spike?
It's cheaper than other chemos..my mom has breast cancer and her chemo according to insurance cost 65k per infusion every 3 weeks.
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What's unethical is a system that completely drains a person's wealth for getting sick.
Certainly this happens for procedures that should be cheap, and nursing homes are also a huge issue. But in the current discussion it's not clear to me that something like a heart transplant should be cheap. Development of a novel treatment can be very expensive and sometimes involves scarce resources.
My dad was fortunate enough to get into a trial at Sloan for Obinutuzumab for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. At the moment, after 6 weeks of treatment, the percent of cancerous cells in his bone marrow has gone from 95% to 5%. The treatment was very intense as it overloads the kidneys on the first few treatments due to the dramatic amount of cells being flushed out. This is a cancer for which there was not much treatm…
For leukemia, there are a lot of promising new treatments and clinical trials. For metastatic solid-state tumors, much less. We're still in the dark ages of cancer treatment.
[1] https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=%22metastatic+solid-state+...
> It was a small trial, just 18 rectal cancer patients, just 12 "All 12 patients (100%; 95% confidence interval, 74 to 100) had a clinical complete response, with no evidence of tumor on magnetic resonance imaging, 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose–positron-emission tomography, endoscopic evaluation, digital rectal examination, or biopsy. " https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445
https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20220605/dos...
> At the time of presentation, 18 patients were enrolled on trial.
> Results among the 14 patients with at least 6 months follow-up showed a complete response among all patients (95% CI, 74-100), with no evidence of tumor on biopsy, digital rectal exam, endoscopic visualization, fluorodeoxyglucose-PET or MRI. The other four patients are responding to treatment.
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Is that the real price of a nursing home in the US? Who can afford that?
Yes - that's not unreasonable for a full time care facility for something like dementia or Alzheimer's in the US (it's below what we paid for my grandmothers). If you're lucky - they have long term care insurance, and that covers most of the expenses for approx 2 to 10 years (depending on how old the insurance is - it's getting harder to find long plans, and they're all getting significantly more expensive as it turn…
I did some math on the premiums he'd paid for the insurance, and the payout. It was a break even.
In other words, putting the premiums into an HSA would have financially worked out a lot better.
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For leukemia, there are a lot of promising new treatments and clinical trials. For metastatic solid-state tumors, much less. We're still in the dark ages of cancer treatment.
FYI: your comment is a unique result for “metastatic solid-state tumors”[1], so much much less? [1] https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=%22metastatic+solid-state+...
> The medication was given every three weeks for six months and cost about $11,000 per dose. That’s an $88,000 treatment for the medication alone. Given the apparent success of the drug, is it expected for the price to drop as the volume of patients spike?
This is why although I’ve almost got enough money to retire (~20x yearly expenses) but I’ll keep on working for another decade or two. All of these whiz-bang new treatments are going to be expensive. The most expensive medical procedure right now is a heart transplant at about $1M. Then there’s the $10k/mo for a nursing home
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> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls.
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As with most experiments there's a control group (6 patients). The original statement of 18 participants is correct along with yours of 12 patient treatment group.
But then I guess it is slightly less surprising that all 12 people had remission, rather than all 18. (Or if all 18 had remission, then that's amazing but might not be to do with the drug.) Maybe it is still a great result, just slightly less significant.