The Food and Drug Administration approved Kymriah, a new treatment for kids with leukemia. “While Novartis’ decision to set a price at $475,000 per treatment may be seen by some as restraint, we believe it is excessive,” he said in a prepared statement. “Novartis should not get credit for bringing a $475,000 drug to market and claiming they could have charged people a lot more.”Novartis is claiming exactly that, but a lot more. But this is no simple drug: patients’ own white blood cells are removed, genetically engineered, and reinserted, a process that, for the Novartis product, takes 22 days. (Mitchell disagrees: he says $16 million barely covers the grants given just to Novartis’ partner, Penn scientist Carl June.)

Source: Forbes August 30, 2017 21:02 UTC