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FDA Approves First-Ever Gene Therapy For Inherited Form of Blindness (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: In a historic move, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved a pioneering gene therapy for a rare form of childhood blindness, the first such treatment cleared in the United States for an inherited disease. The approval signals a new era for gene therapy, a field that struggled for decades to overcome devastating setbacks but now is pushing forward in an effort to develop treatments for haemophilia, sickle-cell anaemia, and an array of other genetic diseases. Yet the products, should they reach patients, are likely to cost as much as $1 million for both eyes.
First steps are always expensive.
Why do you hate freedom of choice? Instead of being condemned to have health care, you can freely choose between having health insurance and eating.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First steps are always expensive.
If this logic held true, diabetics would be able to buy insulin at the local dollar store, and QVC would be running a holiday special on cancer treatments.
Currently stats say that only less than 10 percent of people in the USA have diabetes, if that number was closer to 50% then hell yes you would be able to get all your supplies at the dollar store. If you look it is a large enough percentage of people to be alarmed, but it's not enough of an issue to make enough people need those medical supplies to make the massive scale of production worth it.
Wake me when they update the gonads so the repair is heritable.
Currently stats say that only less than 10 percent of people in the USA have diabetes, if that number was closer to 50% then hell yes you would be able to get all your supplies at the dollar store.
"Only 10%"? That's over 30 million people. WELL past minimum efficient scale for production and distribution. Anything that affects double digit percentages of the US population is a gigantic market for a single drug.
The reasons medications are expensive is because in the US we have a completely retarded system for buying them that gives all the power in the relationship to the drug company. They charge a lot because they can. Most countries solve this by having a single payer system so drug prices get regulated to reasonable prices. Evidently we aren't so smart in the US so we pay far more than almost anywhere else.
Before someone rushes of to cure sickle-cell disease, there is a reason it exists: better protection against malaria
However, there is a group of low-income citizens that have serious issues paying the heavy monthly insurance fee. And instead of helping them out somehow with a low-income emergency fund, our gov in all there wisdom decided to penalize them with an extra 50% monthly fine _until all late payments are solved_ (!).
The USA values individual freedom a bit higher than we do. Hence, i do understand the critisism towards obliged insurances like obamacare.
Because the USA is a republic of states, and obamacare implementation details were left up to them, the details vary significantly here. In California at this point, if you have less than $1,300-ish/mo in income as a single individual, you get ACA coverage provided by Medi-Cal and in general get no-cost health care with full prescription coverage. That's a pretty paltry amount of money, but if you live in one of the dinkier and dirtier counties around the periphery, you can live on a job like that so long as you don't live alone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Almost a century ago, scientists discovered insulin, and found it could be used to treat diabetes. They sold that patented idea for $1 as a goodwill gesture because they knew their discovery could save millions of lives.
Fact-checking this one, and it turns out to be true. The researchers who discovered insulin, Banting, Collip and Best, did sell the patent for one dollar.
https://www.healio.com/hematology-oncology/news/print/hemonc-today/%7Bb3848683-e962-43ac-b23b-5b2c10f711a8%7D/frederick-banting-discovered-insulin-in-1921
I'm confused?
I was told from 2000-2007 that Bush II's ban on stem cell research was going to "forever put the US behind in medical technology" and genetic science?
Has "forever" passed already? I'm older than I thought.
-Styopa
When you are trying to be a righteous asshole, the first step is to get your facts fucking right.
Who peed in your cereal this morning? The only thing I'm being righteous about is the stupid system we have for paying for drugs in the US and if you aren't pissed off about that there is something wrong with you.
Most diabetics dont use insulin. Full fucking stop. Dipshit.
First off before you turn into a green rage monster please notice that I DID NOT SAY INSULIN even once. You are trying to put words in my mouth I didn't say. Second, we have millions of people in the US with diabetes and that's a huge market for drugs no matter how you slice it. Well past the market size where economies of scale are realized. Any drug or treatment used by more than a million people (and insulin falls into that category fyi) should not be hugely expensive to make and can be sold for reasonable prices under a rational health care system.
Seriously dude, try decaf.
That 10% number is for both Type 1 and Type 2 (and presumably Type 3 included with the Type 1). Type 1 diabetes (the kind you need insulin for) amounts to about 1.25 million people, so rather less than 0.5%....
Please note that I never wrote the word "insulin" even once. So I'm not sure who you think you are responding to with your pedantry but it wasn't anything I wrote.
Well, $1 million for each eye... maybe we'll advance research enough to finally know how much costs an arm and a leg!
I8-D
Why do you hate freedom of choice? Instead of being condemned to have health care, you can freely choose between having health insurance and eating.
I don't hate freedom, it is you wing-nuts who get off on demonising the concept of insurance. Another thing is that even though I live in a country that has implemented many of the blasphemous ideas of social democracy I can afford to BOTH pay for health insurance AND eat. Now ask yourself: why do people in your country have to choose between health insurance and eating? ... and this even though you have such a wonderful for maximum possible profit healthcare system and I have a single payer healthcare system conceived of in the socialist bowes of hell by lucifer himself. And why do such systems all over Europe costs significantly less to run per patient than your for maximum possible profit system does?
You ought to be grateful that the thing exists at all to begin with. Billions of dollars were spent just to get here, with many, many big failures along the way (including some people who have died during the experimental phases.)
Even if we exclude all of that, you have to think about what it takes just to execute this treatment on just one person: They have to customize the vector's (a virus) genome to fit the patients genome, and then they have to produce millions of them. If it's not done right, it can kill the patient.
Besides, people are speculating that this will be the price based on what it takes to do this; they haven't actually announced any price.
Greed indeed.
Normally I'd think that setting a price on some good or service would factor in things like the cost of producing it, reasonable return to the provider, and liability in case things go wrong. But here we see that the price depends on how much the customer stands to gain from using the product. So it's a case of controlling the supply to raise the price. That is greed.
http://www.sciencealert.com/first-fda-gene-therapy-inherited-disease-childhood-blindness
You might want to have your sarcasm detector checked.... jeeeeeesh...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This solution only works for a very particular kind of childhood blindness. It doesn't affect many people, which is one reason it has to be so expensive. All the R&D money that would normally have been recouped from tens of thousands of patients (or more) has to be recouped from a few hundred. It's hardly greed to not want to lose money on a breakthrough therapy, especially for a disease that had no treatments before this.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
The total cost isn't likely to be much different in other places, but the proportion paid by the individual (or their family, since it's a degenerative disease and early treatment is best) will definitely vary by country.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.