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Biogen-Sage Therapeutics postpartum depression pill priced at $15900
- sufimalang 3y agotoo cheap
- jayzalowitz 3y agoHow the hell is the price that high.
- dboreham 3y agoBecause tax payers are going to pay for it?
- moralestapia 3y agoThis is prob. the right answer but w/ insurance companies instead of taxpayers' money.
- gymbeaux 3y agoDrug research is expensive and drug companies aren’t charities
- Jotra7 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bugglebeetle 3y agoExcept that they generally rely on the charity of public institutions and funding to do their research for them, so…
- albert180 3y agoExcept that most of the research part gets done by public universities. They just do the approval studies
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asadotzler 3y agoPrivate doesn't beat public "massively" but probably comes out around 2:1. I'd say that's "solidly" but certainly not all the way to "massively". Further, that's a lot of public money, and there are plenty of private drugs that came out of that money.
- gottorf 3y ago> They just do the approval studies Idea, meet execution.
- asadotzler 3y ago15-30% of pharma costs is marketing.
- xeckr 3y agoDoctors and the sick have to find out about your drug somehow.
- asadotzler 3y agoDoctors can follow industry news and inform patients.
- xeckr 3y agoNow imagine your business had to fully rely on this strategy to reach its market.
- asadotzler 3y agoI'm fine with businesses dealing in human rights having a few more hoops to jump through.
- ge96 3y agoGuess I'll die
- missedthecue 3y agoFrom the article: "Jefferies had estimated peak sales of... $250 million to $500 million for postpartum depression." How much does it cost to bring a drug to market and then manufacture and distribute it? If it was a $6 pill, this would simply have never been developed, let alone distributed to struggling mothers. I think the high cost of drugs is a symptom of an ignored issue. The fact is that it costs an eye-watering sum to get something to market. Obviously not all of it is remediable, after all, someone still has to do the biology and science work in a state of the art lab to invent these things. But some of it is remediable. I remember a press conference by the head of the FDA during Covid, who proudly stated that the vaccine was going to be approved 10x faster than other drugs without compromising safety or efficacy. That's great! But if we aren't sacrificing safety or efficacy and getting new drugs 10x as fast, why isn't that standard operating procedure? If it were to cost only $20m or $50m or $100m to get a new drug to market instead of up to $2 billion (current avg cost estimate per CBO.gov website), I imagine drugs would start at lower price points, and even if the free market didn't do its thing, regulating prices would be easier without defacto banning new drugs. But this is just a simple economic argument. I am not a biochemical researcher, and I don't want Thalidomide to happen again. But as long as it costs $3-$10 billion to break even on new drugs, (let alone profit) I don't see how drug prices can get lower. It's just math.
- darth_avocado 3y agoKeep in mind that number comes from companies spending way more money on sales and marketing than actual RnD. E.g: https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-study-in-the-midst-of-covid-19-crisis-7-out-of-10-big-pharma-companies-spent-more-on-sales-and-marketing-than-r-d https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-study-in-the-midst-of... And let’s not forget the part where a lot of costs are also subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
- missedthecue 3y agoA lot of basic research is government funded, i.e. grants for ongoing research at public universities, but except in extreme outlier cases like the global pandemic, private biotech companies don't get free government handouts for their drug research, and certainly not in meaningful amounts. For perspective, privately funded medical research spend is more than 5x the total NIH budget, and only a portion of the NIH budget actually goes to drug research.
- tech_ken 3y agoWell one factor is drug companies' outsized margins: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7054843/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7054843/
- missedthecue 3y agoSo the median pharma industry profit margin is 13.8%. Forget lowering it to fortune 500 average... take it zero. How much lower do drug costs get? Not much. This pill is still going to cost many thousands of dollars.
- tech_ken 3y agoAny solution will require targeting multiple sources of cost. As you point out elsewhere, R&D is a big cost driver, but profit seems comparable [1]. Moreover one does have to wonder about the various sources of that R&D cost, I'm not an expert but it would seem to me that issues like "evergreening" would inflate development costs unnecessarily. [1] https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/evidence-base/how-did-the-public-u-s-drugmakers-sales-expenses-and-profits-change-over-time https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/evidence-base/how-did-the-publi...
- cameldrv 3y agoThe way the system is set up, if the drug is FDA approved, insurance companies and medicare basically have to pay for it, regardless of the price. The drug companies are testing exactly how far they can push this before the system changes. So far it has remained resilient.
- underseacables 3y agoEver heard of Martin Shkreli ?
- rhuru 3y ago1. It is not the price of the pill. It is the price of the entire 14 day course. 2. There are only 500K or mothers who suffer from PPD each year in USA. May be 200K or so of them would actually be willing to take medicines. And if the course costs say $100 then it would be $20M in revenue. Do you really think it is possible to run it profitably while employing 100s of people making and testing and distributing these pills ? Especially given that infants are involved ?
- asadotzler 3y agoThere's a lot of space between $100 and $16,000, a lot.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y agoNow extrapolate for worldwide distribution and your math falls apart. It's profiteering, plain and simple.
- xeckr 3y agoThe women suffering from postpartum depression are presumably getting way more than $16k in value from the treatment. Furthermore, developing drugs and bringing them to market is a long, expensive process.
- zug_zug 3y agoDoubt it. You can calculate what % of mothers feel this way by selling it (no insurance) for 15k and see who buys it…
- jacquesm 3y agoThe price of the pill is not related to whether it works or not.
- zug_zug 3y agoThe price of the pill must be weighed against the effectiveness of the pill. A 15k treatment can't just be 10% better than placebo to be cost-effective, it needs to be better than any other use of 15k to be justified.
- xeckr 3y agoPresumably this is exactly what Biogen-Sage Therapeutics is doing.
- tyingq 3y agoWell, maybe they get 16k in value, maybe it doesn't work for them at all. Pretty expensive gamble.
- xeckr 3y agoThen take the success probability and multiply it by the value a woman would expect from being free of PPD. I'd wager it's still considerably higher than $16k.
- 3y ago
- kleene_op 3y agoYou get depressed just having to pay for the pill that is supposedly meant to cure depression.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago> Available data from a clinical lactation study in 14 women indicate that zuranolone is present in low levels in human milk (see Data). There are no data on the effects of zuranolone on a breastfed infant and limited data on the effects on milk production. That's an immediate reject. Everyone is able to decide on how much risk their willing to take on, but I don't think it's controversial to conclude that it's ill-advised to administer a medication to infants without testing. On the other hand PPD is associated with maternal suicide, HR 19.300 (95% confidence interval (CI): 5.977–62.255)[1]. While it's not possible to conclude that Zuranolone reducing PPD would also reduce maternal suicide, avoiding that HR is notable. How much would you pay to reduce avoid feeling so bad you successfully committed suicide? 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9099720/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9099720/
- xeckr 3y agoGiven that human breast milk can be (imperfectly) substituted, the benefits clearly outweigh the cost regarding depression and suicide. Even more so when you factor in the possible health and QoL ramifications for children who lost their mother to suicide.
- all2 3y agoI wonder how effective this is compared to the old and tired "diet, plenty of exercise, plenty of sunlight, and time with people who enjoy you and love you".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klipt 3y agoYou can't just package "people who love you" into a pill though. That probably requires rewinding society to where we all lived close to extended family.
- zug_zug 3y agoI wonder how effective this is compared to a 15k cash infusion
- itishappy 3y agoIt's almost certainly less. Keep in mind though that your treatment isn't 100% effective either, particularly considering the hormonal changes involved.
- sudobash1 3y agoWell this is a postpartum pill so plenty of exercise may be out. Depending on how labor and birth went the mother may not be in any condition to exercise. Also I think most mothers already get more time with loved ones postpartum than other times. Postpartum is typically a time of little sleep, rapidly changing hormones, and lots of lifestyle changes too. So postpartum depression is very common, and not something that is so trivial to solve.
- nielsbot 3y agoThat is quite a price. Curious what the cost will be to governments and consumers in countries with socialized medicine and/or public health insurance.
- driggs 3y ago> The intravenous PDD treatment Zulresso, also made by Sage, costs $34,000 a year. So, by some definition, this $16k pill course is a bargain.
- sudobash1 3y agoAnecdotally I have heard from several mothers who have had serious depression and took the prescribed anti-depression pills (not this one). They all worked to remove suicidal impulses and some of the serious effects of depression, but reportedly they did so by dampening feelings altogether, removing much of the postpartum joy at the same time.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y agohttps://archive.ph/fFLSY https://archive.ph/fFLSY