Guest viewing is limited

Titans Talk - Home for all things Tennessee Titans

Status
Not open for further replies.
A

archived

Prospect
LEGEND
Moola
0
A couple months ago the FDA approved a new treatment for certain types of cancer. A little background on it:

For years, the foundations of cancer treatment were surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Over the last two decades, targeted therapies like imatinib (Gleevec®) and trastuzumab (Herceptin®)—drugs that target cancer cells by homing in on specific molecular changes seen primarily in those cells—have also cemented themselves as standard treatments for many cancers.

But over the past several years, immunotherapy—therapies that enlist and strengthen the power of a patient’s immune system to attack tumors—has emerged as what many in the cancer community now call the “fifth pillar” of cancer treatment.

A rapidly emerging immunotherapy approach is called adoptive cell transfer (ACT): collecting and using patients’ own immune cells to treat their cancer. There are several types of ACT (see “ACT: TILs, TCRs, and CARs”), but, thus far, the one that has advanced the furthest in clinical development is called CAR T-cell therapy.

Until recently, the use of CAR T-cell therapy has been restricted to small clinical trials, largely in patients with advanced blood cancers. But these treatments have nevertheless captured the attention of researchers and the public alike because of the remarkable responses they have produced in some patients—both children and adults—for whom all other treatments had stopped working.

In 2017, two CAR T-cell therapies were approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one for the treatment of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and the other for adults with advanced lymphomas. Nevertheless, researchers caution that, in many respects, it’s still early days for CAR T cells and other forms of ACT, including questions about whether they will ever be effective against solid tumors like breast and colorectal cancer.
Click to expand...

Essentially you hand some of your white blood cells over to a drug company which engineers them to kill certain cancers, and then they're put back into you.

View attachment 12470

.Two months after Gilead Sciences Inc.’s breakthrough treatment was approved in the U.S. to treat a deadly form of blood cancer, only a tiny handful of patients have actually gotten the costly therapy, while others linger on waiting lists.

Five people have received the treatment, called Yescarta, at the 15 cancer hospitals authorized to administer it in the U.S., the hospitals told Bloomberg. Waiting lists for the $373,000 treatment have grown to at least 200 people, shrinking only as some very sick patients have died.

Doctors at the cancer centers blame holdups in getting the treatment paid for by Medicare and Medicaid, the two giant U.S. government health programs, as well as some of the U.S.’s largest insurers....
Click to expand...

The whole thing costs the hospital (or at least the few currently equipped and authorized to provide this service) a lot more than just the $373K sticker price to buy the cell engineering itself, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of additional dollars in costs for hospitals added on to that, not only in preparing for and administering the treatment once they send/get back from the drug company the cells but also in dealing with the toxicity to the patient of the process.

It's a (morbidly) interesting ethical dilemma. The people in line for this treatment are at the end of their rope, but no hospital can afford to give away a half million dollars or more of care per case without knowing if anyone is going to reimburse them for it.
 
It's the scene from Southpark. The cure for AIDS is 500k dollars injected directly into the blood. They tell all the African kids and no one cares.
 
MariGOATa said:
A couple months ago the FDA approved a new treatment for certain types of cancer. A little background on it:



Essentially you hand some of your white blood cells over to a drug company which engineers them to kill certain cancers, and then they're put back into you.

View attachment 12470



The whole thing costs the hospital (or at least the few currently equipped and authorized to provide this service) a lot more than just the $373K sticker price to buy the cell engineering itself, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of additional dollars in costs for hospitals added on to that, not only in preparing for and administering the treatment once they send/get back from the drug company the cells but also in dealing with the toxicity to the patient of the process.

It's a (morbidly) interesting ethical dilemma. The people in line for this treatment are at the end of their rope, but no hospital can afford to give away a half million dollars or more of care per case without knowing if anyone is going to reimburse them for it.
Click to expand...
I think the "ethical" dilemma has been answered time and time again by those with the know how and ability to use these techniques, basically reserved for the rich.

Glad to see the confusing of multiple different avenues for treatment though. Possibly having enough and with successful results may actually allow somewhat of a bidding war that may lower costs overall.

Outside of that, some of those charities that exist have millions of dollars, maybe they can put some to use and fix a few cancer patients.
 
If you want to see some fascinating cancer treatments and real answers to the opiod epidemic, then check out Nektar. I wish I would have bought their stock last summer...
 
Fairweather Fan said:
If you want to see some fascinating cancer treatments and real answers to the opiod epidemic, then check out Nektar. I wish I would have bought their stock last summer...
Click to expand...

Bosnian beer, really good. Sells out fast around here because of all the former Yugoslavia immigrants we have in the area.

43104.jpg
 
It is always costly in the beginning.

They will find ways to get the cost down in time.

Of course this doesn't help the individual with 6 months left to live and not enough capital to afford this treatment.
 
Tennessy XO said:
Mainly first response to accidents.

More arson than you'd think though.

People are constantly burning old buildings and houses for insurance.

A lot of rural rednecks burning brush and trash and letting it get out of control.
Click to expand...

Oh, I bet there is a lot of arson. We have a ton of it around here. It used to be much worse though it is usually businesses and not houses.

A sex toy store was torched once, but it was the clothing store that started it. They were "Going out of business". They had to have a special hazmat team come to clean it up. The fumes from the melted sex toys were toxic lol.
 
Tennessy XO said:
Mainly first response to accidents.

More arson than you'd think though.

People are constantly burning old buildings and houses for insurance.

A lot of rural rednecks burning brush and trash and letting it get out of control.
Click to expand...

There is a Frito-Lay plant nearby, the fire trucks get called out there at least a couple times a month.
 
The companies that find these "cures" and amazing medical products pour in tens of millions of dollars hoping that one of these theories actually comes positive.

How much is life worth to you? There's a cost for everything, but having the potential cure for cancer isn't something you can find at any Walmart.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest posts

Back
Top