Provenge immune-boosting prostate cancer drug costs $93,000 per patient

[Earth_First]

I just read an article in the LBN which stated that Medicare will cover the cost of Provenge, and listed it's price tag: $93,000 per patient.

The claim is that Provenge is able to boost the immune system of terminal stage-four prostate cancer patients lives an average of four months.

$23,250 per month!

Dendreon’s reasoning behind the "aggressive market pricing" was so that they would be able to recoup the nearly $1 billion dollars in research and development spent over the past 15 years.

CEO Mitchell Gold even admits that they believe that they can sell between $1.5 to $2.5 billion by the middle of 2011.

According to what I've read, Dendreon is throttling availability of it's drug to 50 medical centers nationally, a move which certainly allows for them to drive it's price to obscene levels.

This drives me so fucking angry to hear that they are 'struggling' in the medical research and delivery "INDUSTRY" to make money.

That's exactly what it is: a profit-driven, INDUSTRY.

[azurnoir]

1. Part of he cost may be due to the drug having to be made to order for each patient

it is made from the patients own leukocytes (white blood cells), I do not mean to sound cold but I question if the cost and side effects are really worth an additional 4 months of life, if it was a cure that would be different



Sipuleucel-T (APC8015, Provenge),<1><2> manufactured by Dendreon Corporation, is a patient specific therapeutic cancer vaccine for prostate cancer (CaP). A therapeutic vaccine is designed to treat the active disease. A preventive vaccine is to cure the condition (usually a virus) causing the cancer. As of 2011 there are two approved prophylactic cancer prevention vaccines. These are for the cancer causing viruses HPV and HBV.

A course of Sipuleucel-T treatment consists of three basic steps:

1. A patient's own white blood cells, primarily antigen-presenting cells (APCs), also called Dendritic cells, are extracted in a leukapheresis procedure.
2. The blood product is sent to the factory and incubated with a fusion protein (PA2024) consisting of two parts,
1. the antigen prostatic acid phosphatase (PAP), which is present in 95% of prostate cancer cells, and
2. an immune signaling factor granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) that helps the APCs to mature.
3. The activated blood product (APC8015) is returned from the factory to the infusion center and re-infused into the patient to cause an immune response against cancer cells carrying the PAP antigen.<3><4>

A complete Sipuleucel-T treatment repeats three courses over the span of a month, with two weeks between successive courses.

This page was last modified on 7 March 2011 at 06:45.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipuleucel-T

[HubertHeaver]

2. One of the Koch Bros. has Prostate cancer.

Coincidence?

Yeah, just coincidence.