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Price Tag On Gene Therapy For Rare Form of Blindness: $850K (apnews.com)
A first-of-its kind genetic treatment for blindness will cost $850,000, less than the $1 million price tag that had been expected, but still among the most expensive medicines in the world. Several readers have shared an Associated Press report: Spark Therapeutics said Wednesday it decided on the lower price for Luxturna (Lux-turn-a) after hearing concerns from health insurers about their ability to cover the injectable treatment. Consternation over skyrocketing drug prices, especially in the U.S., has led to intense scrutiny from patients, Congress, insurers and hospitals. "We wanted to balance the value and the affordability concerns with a responsible price that would ensure access to patients," said CEO Jeffrey Marrazzo, in an interview with The Associated Press. Luxturna is still significantly more expensive than nearly every other medicine on the global market, including two other gene therapies approved earlier last year in the U.S. Approved last month, Luxturna, is the nation's first gene therapy for an inherited disease. It can improve the vision of those with a rare form of blindness that is estimated to affect just a few thousand people in the U.S. Luxturna is an injection -- one for each eye -- that replaces a defective gene in the retina, tissue at the back of the eye that converts light into electric signals that produce vision. The therapy will cost $425,000 per injection.
Just to explain the downmod. You're analogy is stupid and you're an idiot.
First, the Turing machine has as much to do with a modern CPU as Peano Logic has to do with the electronics of a modern scientific calculator. So your analogy is as stupid as you are.
Second, the modern Intel CPU has $100 billion + of Intel funded research behind it while, as the OP was saying, virtually all the work on this was done on publicly funded money. So your analogy is as irrelevant as you are.
Please go fuck off and die.
This is very informative, thank you. Given those figures, 850k looks depressingly like breakeven for the company (if that 86mil/yr was all for this, it would take them (860mil+10mil+3.8mil)/0.95 = 919.79 mil revenue to break even, or about 920k per for 1k patients). I'm sure they have some profit baked in to the figure, but not as egregious as the summary headline sounds by itself.
> Not so much
Yes. Pretty much. Even the NIHs own paper on this subject indicates that the bulk of money spend on drug development comes from the private sector.
The money that the public spends only gets the ball rolling. It doesn't finish the process.
Plus this isn't your typical "one size fits" all pill kind of treatment. These kinds of treatments have to be custom made for each patient. The cost of that isn't trivial. It requires the employment of a large state of the art facility and staff that goes with.
Actual production costs are non-trivial here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.