You know what this sounds like to me?
Like Moderna is gonna ask $10k a poke.
Sure would be nice if capitalism didn’t exist 🤪
It wouldn’t exist at all if capitalism didn’t exist.
People would just get cancer and die like they used to.
Capitalism is the reason we (and you) have nice things.
Capitalism =/= money.
Yes, no innovation has been done under any system but capitalism. /s Let’s forget about how totalitarian Russia was the first to space. Let’s forget about how much medicine was developed under the religious authoritarianism of ancient Arabia. Let’s forget about how much philosophy was conceived under feudalism.
arabic numbers bad.
or is it because edison couldnt claim this to be an american invention aswell? just because america is full of thieves doesnt mean they invented shit.
rockets…werner von braun
lightbulb…lumiere
computer …conrad zuse
internet…tim
i am sure americans have invented absolutely nothing and stolen absolutely everything.
biontech is german, pfizer are the murican scumbags.
tiktok&wechat… chinese
are you still on meta or drugs?
I’m sure leaving reddit was a good idea, but joining lemmy might not have been. People here are just delusional in their approach to reality.
It seems a lot of people came here because they’re too reddit for reddit.
When it’s inevitably going to be a lot less than that, will you eat your words?
If it cost ten thousand dollars I’d throw an enormous party. That’s already a very small price for a cancer treatment.
The article suggests the vaccine prevents the recurrence of a specific cancer by 44% vs conventional treatment alone. So let’s be pessimists and say it only prevents recurrence by 22%. Should we eat our words that still 1/5th of people who’d otherwise die or suffer horribly from a recurring cancer now don’t?
I think I would be more skeptical of the eventual price of this treatment and less about its effectiveness.
As soon as you stop eating that pharma boot, homie.
Damn you weren’t kidding about the Pharma Bros. The fuckin Tankies are glad to not be the dumbasses in thread for once
Oh, what villains! Developing a cure for cancer and asking for ten thousand dollars for it!
In terms of cancer treatment, do you have any idea how small ten thousand dollars is?
america is just sad
Dying from cancer is also sad. Chemo is also sad. Who wins? Find out tonight at 8pm
Do drugs other than betel nuts grow on trees in your country?
Can’t wait for it to be specifically priced for only the 1% to be able to afford. Just like all the other cancer drugs that work.
Why be that cynical about it? All technology is only for the rich when it’s first introduced.
I don’t believe I’m being cynical, I think I’m being realistic.
Recall that the formula for insulin was given for free to the university of toronto and now most people in the USA cannot afford insulin even though the cost of creation has not changed since the 1950’s.
It was only extremely recently that 35 dollar insulin became available in the USA and that’s still obscenely overpriced.
Reference: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-insulin-by-country
IDK, after that I took two doses of Pfizer vaccine (which is a mRNA vaccine) I started to show some heart issues that I never had in my life. I’m even seeing a cardiologist. I’m not trying to be anti-vaccine but I admit that after that I am afraid of mRNA vaccines.
During the little flu virus, whenever there would occur a yet new bunch of deaths due to hear attack, many newspapers would claim “You’ve seen this? And this proves that our magical Vxx works!”. Yes, it does. However, it depends on what you mean by “works”, for whom and for what goal. The same in this case.
I hope so much that this isn’t a predecessor to this.
No, but it gives you autism though /s
An immediate red flag:
“Now if you replace that man with a cop … 🤷 … the picture changes”
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.”
He must be one of those non-Americans with universal healthc*re
But… But everyone having a right to medical care whether they’re rich or poor? Unthinkable! Think of the shareholders!
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.
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.
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.
Ok… hooray?
Time for the antivax doomsday cult to extol the virtues of cancer.
god wants the children to have incurable tumors
I mean don’t people already spout this crap?
I’ve heard this one before…
Safe and effective
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.
Idk man that sounds pretty communist to me
A country, looking after its people?! Get that communism outta here!
The article doesn’t go into much in the way of details, so I can’t begin to say how it might extend into the treatment of other cancers, but it does make it clear that this treatment is specifically for melanoma only. Which is great–it’s a deadly cancer. But without more information, we shouldn’t get too excited about this being able to treat other types of cancer.
I would be extremely surprised if this approach only worked for melanoma. I expect this is just the first cancer type they’ve tried applying it to. Some excitement is warranted here, IMO.
what’s really cool is this plus telomerase will give us a youth serum
How so? Cancer is something that one would be statistically likely to get eventually if you didn’t first die of anything else I suppose, so it’d certainly be useful in extending effective lifespan if you already had a youth serum, but how would a treatment for cancer do anything for other age related disease?
You get cancer all the time your body has natural mechanisms of finding and breaking down the cancerous cells. As we age some of these mechanisms start to falter, cells divide, but small errors over time accumulate.
A youth serum is really not the goal, the goal is fixing errors in these systems, maintaining current functions and creating a new mechanism.
This would work like a booster for this mechanisms and effectively make it possible to maintain and improve these systems. The side effect being an increase lifespan to some degree.
I suppose this I just the cancer component, but several other things are still needed on the field of longevity research for a “youth serum” to be viable.
Here’s the thing: we’re not getting many people to the natural limits of the human body’s age much less working out ways to go past that.
Jeanne Louise Calment was 122 when she died. There’s a hypothesis that she switched identities with her mother at some point, but most scientists who study aging don’t consider it credible. Many other supercentenarian claims don’t hold up; they often come from places that had bad record keeping a century ago, and they just forget how many birthdays they’ve had. 115 seems the typical limit for most people, but even that might have very few legit claims.
There are so few people who make it that far that they’re basically rounding error even when including incorrect claims. Monaco has the highest average life expectancy at 87. We should be able to add almost 30 more years to that before we even talk about extraordinary youth serums.
Better cancer treatments will be part of getting us there, but far from the only factor.
telomeres are cells’ biological clock… they get shorter with each division, and is the general cause of your body breaking down, round the 80’s.
telomerase and other chemicals can reset those telomeres, but also cause the body’s existing precancerous cells to go malignant. (telomeres also limit cancer cell growth, and creating telomerase is one of the mutations required for full on cancer)
so, if we can regrow cells telomeres without causing cancer… we have a youth serum.
but there’s already other telomerase gene therapy in development anyways…and is the general cause of your body breaking down
This is the step where a heavy [citation needed] comes along. There are a lot of complex processes involved in aging, we have no idea if simply “make the telomeres longer!” is going to solve all of that. Frankly it seems unlikely that that’s all there is to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an optimist when it comes to longevity research. I think aging is a problem that will eventually be solved. But there’s not going to be just one “cure for aging”, there’s a lot of things that go wrong over time and we’re probably going to have to find ways to fix each of them as they come along.
Right. You would have to look at alzheimers, osteoporosis, arthritis, liver failure, heart failure, gut microbe health, and a million other things that can go wrong in old age. It’s a tall claim to say “all this can be solved by telemerase”. In fact, having one thing claiming to solve a million different issues is a big red flag for quack medicine.
