Novartis Kymriah, a single dose is priced at $475,000. Steep price for a medicine, or is it a medicine ?
It is CAR-T therapy that is developed to target an increasing number of cancers
“And these price tags don’t include the delivery of post-therapy care to CAR-T patients, who typically suffer complications from the infusion. Subsequent hospital stays and supportive care can drive the total costs to a million dollars or more. Merely counting the seventy-five hundred U.S. patients who meet the current F.D.A. indications for Yescarta, the estimated annual expenditure could be three billion dollars.”
Biggest business in town, thats Why we are investing in Tmunity
Quote above is from Siddhartha Mukherjee The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies
I am curious to know how you market and deliver a “medicine” like Kymriah
-Cost considerations: even if we treat as a procedure and not a medicine CAR-T can have 6- figures cost (Kymriah introduced a world first: performace therapy, pay if satisfied)
-treating it as a medicine could stiffen marginal improvements, procedures on the other end have more lax approval for small ietrative improvements
-a medicine is manifactured, a procedure is a surgeon’s craft, unless a way is found to mass manifacture CAR-T there will be conflicts
Cellicon Valley
1500-Pound Goat 