Joy Kong, MD warns that pharmaceutical companies entering stem-cell and gene therapy will drive up treatment costs. A single gene-therapy injection already costs $750,000, and bringing a drug to market averages $2.1 billion, expenses that get passed to patients.
$750,000.
$2.1 billion.
One risk of big pharma coming into the space is that the price is going to go much higher. So just trust me on this. Watch a Natural Selection on Netflix. It's about gene therapy. So one gene therapy, one treatment, one vial of injection the pharmaceutical companies developed, it costs $750,000. So that's one injection. Because guess what? They want to recoup their money. Guess how much it costs to get a drug into the Marketplace. On average, $2.1 billion. So who has that kind of money? Big pharma. Right. So if they put in $2.1 billion to get the FDA approval, guess what? They're going to want to get that money back. And who will pay for it? So just know, just because the FDA is approving it doesn't make your life better, necessarily.
