The vaccine works by instructing the body to make up to 34 “neoantigens.” These are proteins found only on the cancer cells, and Moderna personalizes the vaccine for each recipient so that it carries instructions for the neoantigens on their cancer cells.
That’s pretty dope
You mispelled “expensive.”
I wonder if, even at this early stage of the therapy’s development, this would actually be more affordable than the alternative.
Melanoma patients are highly likely to have the cancer come back and or metastasize. Repeat treatments and hospitalizations are not cheap.
Which is why the Moderna vaccine will be priced at just 95% of the cost of the repeat treatments and hospitalization plus the value of the time saved and pain and suffering avoidance by the patient. Say, an extra half a million. I mean, what price would you put on avoiding seeing your parent or child subjected to round after round of chemotherapy?
Depends on how much time was spent on R&D. You have to recover those costs. I know everyone wants everything for free but it takes a fuck ton of man hours and tons of investments to get to this point. You can’t just give it away unfortunately.
You actually can. The simplest way is to literally just give the research away and charge a fair price for the medicine. That’s allowed.
The slightly more capitalist way would be to sell the rights to the government to recoup costs.
The slightly less capitalist way is for the government to notify you that you don’t own it anymore because of the public good.
This is also ignoring exactly how much the public already funds the basic research that goes into pharmaceuticals, which is quite a bit more than you might expect, so the argument of what’s even “fair” is less clearly in favor of the company than you might expect.
There’s a tricky balance.
For every endeavor that could recoup its costs in a fairly reasonable way, there are several other attempts that end in failure.
If you know that best case your project can be modestly better than break even, but it will most likely completely fail, would you invest in it?
I could respect an argument for outright socializing pharmaceutical efforts and rolling the needs into taxes and cutting out the capitalist angle entirely, but so long as you rely on capitalist funding model in any significant amount, then you have to allow for some incentive. When the research is pretty much fully funded by public funds, that funding should come with strings attached, but here it seems the lead up was largely in capitalist territory.
Did they pay for their own R&D? Usually that get socialized and then the profits are privatized, it’s the American Way.
I like to shit on big pharma as much as the next guy, but in this case, yes they do. Developing new drugs is a ludicrously risky and expensive venture, typically costing billions of dollars. Sometimes it may be subsidized somewhat, sure, but the vast majority of it is coming out of pocket for these companies.
This is amazing news for countries with free healthcare! Even though the vaccine is expensive, it’s nowhere as expensive as the care a cancer patient needs today.
Plus you can send a healthy individual back to their families and into society again.
The shareholders of the pharma-industry will not be happy. You have to manage a disease, not heal it; that would be detrimental for the balance sheet.
And unhappy shareholders of big pharma is definitely not what we want; if they are happy, we will be happy.
I’m very anti-pharma myself (depression is not a chemical imbalance, and pills can’t solve it. Changing lifestyle factors can.) but if your statement were true they wouldn’t have made this vaccine in the first place.
A bit oversimplified but generally true for persistent bummed out. Not true for acute suicideation, which is real, a threat, and can be resolved with drugs or listening to the suicide call.
Are you saying there is proof that suicidal people have a chemical imbalance in the brain? I’m aware of instances of correlation between chemicals found in spinal taps and depression, but correlation does not equal causation and drug companies and doctors love to pretend it does in this case. I believe the the chemical imbalance is caused by the depression, no the other way around. I can’t prove that, but they can’t prove their claim either as far as i can tell.
Are you saying there is proof that suicidal people have a chemical imbalance in the brain? I’m aware of instances of correlation between chemicals found in spinal taps and depression, but correlation does not equal causation and drug companies and doctors love to pretend it does in this case. I believe the the chemical imbalance is caused by the depression, no the other way around. I can’t prove that, but they can’t prove their claim either as far as i can tell.
Are you saying there is proof that suicidal people have a chemical imbalance in the brain? I’m aware of instances of correlation between chemicals found in spinal taps and depression, but correlation does not equal causation and drug companies and doctors love to pretend it does in this case. I believe the the chemical imbalance is caused by the depression, no the other way around. I can’t prove that, but they can’t prove their claim either as far as i can tell.
