First result on Googling the normal cost of cancer treatments
> Newly approved cancer drugs cost an average of $10,000 per month, with some therapies topping $30,000 per month, according to ASCO, which discussed the costs of cancer care at a recent meeting. Just a decade ago, the average cost per month of new drugs was about $4,500.
It seems $4,000 is rather a small fee in comparison.
The insurance market and the government providing medicaid loves these types of cures. An effective cure that costs a few thousand dollars is obviously worth the healthy cured people living to pay premiums for the rest of their healthy life. Much preferable to a costly patient needing many treatments in the tens of thousands of dollars in the insurance pool. The economics are much better than what the system currently bears.
" Two infants with relapsed refractory CD19+ B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia received lymphodepleting chemotherapy and anti-CD52 serotherapy, followed by a single-dose infusion of UCART19 cells"[1]
With that context, it's potentially cheaper than other therapies.
If I understand that the article is claiming a new treatment could cure cancer for $4000, then this is orders of magnitude cheaper than all the combined treatments that are administered now to treat cancer.
I agree the manufacturing cost of $4,000 doesn't seem unreasonable, but that's the manufacturing cost. The article also states either of these competing treatments would cost insurers half a million $ or more, so it will be much more expensive than today's treatments. Still worth it, but absurdly expensive especially compared to the manufacturing cost.
doubt it would stay that expensive if proven, mass manufacturing surely would drop it quickly.
with regards to the mention of other companies more complex methods, perhaps its merely reminding people that complex solutions are not always the only way
Unfortunately the market for therapies does not follow the same market scaling model as consumer electronics due to the various financial models of insurance companies, government subsidies, etc.
Technology products often decrease in price. But for cancer treatments it's the opposite. New treatments used to cost $4,500 a decade ago and cost $10,000 to $30,000 now.
That's a function of perverse incentives, rather than some sort of immutable truth. If there were stronger penalties for (e.g.) cartel-like pricing (e.g. TKIs), and more price transparency for the true costs of care (ibid), we might see less of this. Or if, say, the primary market for such drugs adopted a single-payer system where the payer negotiated on behalf of the patients, rather than on behalf of its shareholders.
Gleevec and Sprycel are the canonical examples of "competition makes the price go up" but if a single payer dominated the market and used this as leverage, it would be simple enough to just say "not at that price" and force manufacturers to play ball. The real problem is regulatory and legislative capture which prevents this from happening.
