Sometimes it's not a myth. We can _cure_ a few kinds of leukemia with T-cell therapies. There is no way we know of to do so cheaply. https://www.newyorker.co

Sometimes it's not a myth. We can _cure_ a few kinds of leukemia with T-cell therapies. There is no way we know of to do so cheaply. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/the-promise-and-price-of-cellular-therapies https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/the-promise-an... Perhaps the most immediate implication of the blurring of lines between procedure and drug is the conundrum of price. A single dose of Kymriah for pediatric ALL is priced at $475,000; for Yescarta, a CD19 T-cell therapy designed for certain types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, that number is $373,000. These prices rival those of some of the most expensive procedures in American medicine. (A kidney transplant can be priced at $415,000, a lung transplant at about $860,000.) 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. ... Drug pricing is, of course, at the center of a familiar and inevitably acrimonious debate. The pharmaceutical industry defends high prices as a means to recoup the costs of drug discovery and development. Consumers, insurers, and governments argue that the prices charged for drugs are out of control, and bear no relationship to their real costs. But with cellular therapies the problem isn’t merely profiteering—it is that, unlike conventional drugs, cell therapies are inherently expensive to produce. The estimated cost to manufacture a typical CAR-T infusion is close to six figures. In short, even if CAR-T therapy were offered with no margin of profit, it would still rank with some of the most expensive procedures in medicine. Extracting cells from an individual patient, purifying them, genetically modifying them, and expanding their numbers into the millions will never be akin to churning out amoxicillin in a factory.