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A couple months ago the FDA approved a new treatment for certain types of cancer. A little background on it:
CAR T Cells: Engineering Patients’ Immune Cells to Treat Their Cancers
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.
It's not the most pleasant of processes but it seems to have pretty impressive results.
The only snag is, somebody has to pay for it.
Months After Approval, Breakthrough Cancer Drug Given to Just Five Patients
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.
CAR T Cells: Engineering Patients’ Immune Cells to Treat Their Cancers
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.
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.
It's not the most pleasant of processes but it seems to have pretty impressive results.
The only snag is, somebody has to pay for it.
Months After Approval, Breakthrough Cancer Drug Given to Just Five Patients
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.
Those payment delays -- which may not be resolved for months -- have forced the hospitals to choose between putting millions of dollars at risk, or asking dying patients to keep waiting despite the availability of a potential cure.
Private insurance companies are making coverage decisions for Yescarta on a case-by-case basis, while the Medicare program for the elderly hasn’t created a reimbursement code for the treatment -- meaning hospitals don’t have any guarantee they’ll be paid.
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.
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