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Wednesday, September 13th, 2017

New Gene-Therapy Treatments Will Carry Whopping Price Tags

Author:     GINA KOLATA
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     SEPT. 11, 2017
Link: New Gene-Therapy Treatments Will Carry Whopping Price Tags
Stephan:   In addition to the one good thing this report describes, we now have a new technology that allows us to alter flawed DNA, there are also so many bad things it tells us about the pharmaceutical industry. To begin with this sector of our economy is predicated on profiting from human misery. It demonstrates to us in a way no words can dispel that the small group of men and women who control Big Pharma are lacking in the human empathy and Christian compassion in which they drape themselves. They have created an illness profit system that has only one priority: profit. Finally, this article confirms what I have been saying about the Homo Superior Trend and the fact that its principal beneficiaries will not be general society, but a small group of the uber rich.

Emily Whitehead, who received an experimental precursor to the gene-therapy treatment Kymriah, which put her leukemia into remission. The treatment has a $475,000 price tag, raising questions about how patients and insurers will pay.
Credit T. J. Kirkpatrick/The New York Times

The first gene therapy treatment in the United States was approved recently by the Food and Drug Administration, heralding a new era in medicine that is coming faster than most realize — and that perhaps few can afford.

The treatment, Kymriah, made by Novartis, is spectacularly effective against a rare form of leukemia, bringing remissions when all conventional options have failed. It will cost $475,000.

With gene therapy, scientists seek to treat or prevent disease by modifying cellular DNA. Many such treatments are in the wings: There are 34 in the final stages of testing necessary for F.D.A. approval, and another 470 in initial clinical trials, according to the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, an advocacy group.

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