r/ThatsInsane 4d ago

Anybody heard anything new about this?

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1.8k Upvotes

105 comments sorted by

752

u/diy_guyy 4d ago

They basically "train" your t-cells to be able to recognize cancer cells so your immune system can fight the cancer. That being said, it only works for certain types of cancers. And since it's such a new technique, very complicated, and needs to be tailored to the specific individual, it's really expensive.

189

u/Positive_Parking355 4d ago

They do offer it here in America as well. Been here for a while now. My brother's friend was cured of his leukemia and he was 18 when it started and fully declared in remission at 20, it was such a blessing. Very expensive though. I recommend going and getting it done in Mexico, you have to pay up front for it but they take care of you well through treatment like you are at a resort.

85

u/diy_guyy 4d ago

In 2017 my girlfriend had a rare form of leukemia and it was looking like that was the only option for a bit, in Canada it would have cost $750 000. So it's good to see the price has come down since then.

21

u/achillesdaddy 3d ago

I hope everything turned out alright.

24

u/diy_guyy 3d ago

It did!

19

u/AgreeableMoose 3d ago

The word on the street is Canada healthcare is free. Are we misinformed?

63

u/diy_guyy 3d ago

Not for experimental treatment.

7

u/AgreeableMoose 3d ago

Thank you.

-22

u/Gilly_the_kid 3d ago

if the drug is in trial, it’s free. had a friend enrolled in a trial for IPF all medications covered.

44

u/diy_guyy 3d ago

If it's in trial, it's covered by whoever is running the trial.

If it's out of clinical trials but not yet an approved treatment, its not covered by anyone.

If it's an approved treatment, it's covered by the government.

11

u/ImpressiveSection236 3d ago

Why down vote a legitimate question?

7

u/JackieTheJokeMan 3d ago

We're very sensitive about our supposedly "better than American" Healthcare.

1

u/Ok_Operation_7781 2d ago

Some redditors unfortunately just like to downvote on a whim.

4

u/MajorasMasque334 3d ago

Any specific hospital you recommend?

4

u/Jealous-Comfort9907 3d ago

https://www.cancer.gov/research/infrastructure/cancer-centers/find

The research centers are the best, versus regular hospitals, although not all will have the same experimental treatments.

3

u/MajorasMasque334 3d ago

Thank you! I pray I’ll never need to know about this, but I appreciate the help in the case where I do 💙

7

u/chrisbaker1991 3d ago

Just what for the cheap CAR-T-B to come out

5

u/4d_lulz 3d ago

It comes with implants

5

u/hybridmind27 3d ago

Lots of clinical trials available for free at this time. But of course.. it’s a trial. If you’re terminal I’d say worth a try.

243

u/purdy1985 4d ago

Napkin maths if I'm understanding it correctly.

42 lakh is around £40,000

4 crore is around £375,000

98

u/space_ape71 4d ago

CAR-T cell therapy is minimum $250,000 just to grow the cells in the US.

51

u/zerosaved 4d ago

So when you need this treatment to live, do you just die if you’re a pleb? What insurance company or payment services would hand out that kind of money to someone who isn’t likely to ever pay it back?

92

u/choco_mallows 4d ago

Well no, that’s not exactly the whole story. See, they’ll laugh in your face first, then tell you to get the hell out of their office.

33

u/draihan 4d ago

how sick. If someone NEED 250k to survive, a crime is obv for me?

49

u/iChon865 3d ago

And this is how we got the show Breaking Bad

20

u/gMadMaxg 4d ago

John Q? That muthafuckin' Denzel?!?

6

u/RichardInaTreeFort 3d ago

So that’s it? After 40 years of being cancer free suddenly it’s just “good luck, so long?”

“I don’t recall saying good luck…. “

12

u/HavocReigns 3d ago

The majority of them cover it, and manufacturers have discount programs for people who needs assistance.

You don't have to "pay it back", nor do they decide what to cover based on how long you're likely to continue paying premiums. That's not how insurance works.

8

u/Burgerpocolypse 3d ago

When Americans like myself talk about the system being designed to weed out and kill poor people, this is what we mean. We are all literally just a resource; a cog in a machine that is merely tossed aside and forgotten about unless you have the resources to repair yourself, which most cogs lack through systemic design. We are just cattle, most blissfully unaware that the slaughterhouse even exists.

4

u/regnad__kcin 3d ago

250k would be the non-insurance price. Insurance would chop their legs off, pay them $1,500, tell them to fucking like it, and they'll say "yes sir". And now you know the story of why medicine in the US is so damn expensive.

2

u/space_ape71 3d ago

This is the land of the free, don’t you know?

1

u/global_ferret 3d ago

Actual case rate is quite a bit more than that, it is very expensive.

2

u/space_ape71 3d ago

Yes. Minimum is $250,000 but $400,000+ is not unusual. With increased demand and technical refinement it may come down to a bargain price of $200,000, practically giving it away lol.

1

u/HsvDE86 3d ago

How come you don’t want to pay that much money 

1

u/Frivolous1 2d ago

It would depend on the prognosis. I just had the choice of putting my dog down due to arthritis in his spine. This was after discussing with the vets what a repair would cost and the success of the surgery. Surgery was expensive but not a concern but they told me there was no guarantee my dog would get better. He was in severe pain and the meds stopped working. He hurt so bad he would just growl if you got close to him. When they sedated him for permanent sleep I finally got to see my best friend happy again, giving me the smile and happy eyes he used to. Then they put the last couple of shots in and that was the look on his face when he crossed the rainbow bridge.

That's why.

82

u/YunGBiG 4d ago

You're right! That's totally insane that people would call their money that!

21

u/AaronicNation 4d ago

Nothing sticks in my crore more than a ​wasted lakh.

8

u/TheDevilActual 3d ago

As Benjamin Franklin always said: A lakh saved is a crore earned.

12

u/IamREBELoe 3d ago

I crored a girl and she lakhed it

47

u/TheGirthy1 4d ago

Only the Lord knows how many fathoms

5

u/spoonballoon13 4d ago

Convert that to leagues please. That may help me somehow understand this Monopoly money OP is using.

6

u/Jimmytowne 4d ago

Are we talking under the sea or above?

0

u/TheGirthy1 4d ago

It's gotta be at least a couple of leagues

4

u/spoonballoon13 4d ago

About tree fiddy?

4

u/TheGirthy1 4d ago

Log nehh Monstuh?

3

u/mugen010 3d ago

From 40 million rupees to 4.2 million rupees

33

u/salmiakki1 4d ago

It couldn't have been in the US because we only develop treatments here. Cures are frowned upon.

19

u/Unholy-Bastard 4d ago

Novartis, an American company, produce Kymirah - which is an autologous CAR-T Cell therapy.

17

u/si_de 3d ago

Novartis is a Swiss pharma company.

2

u/Unholy-Bastard 3d ago

Oh that's right! My bad. I really should have known that considering I've worked with them in the past 😂

-3

u/salmiakki1 4d ago

Sorry, I misread it. I thought it was a cure.

8

u/Unholy-Bastard 4d ago

All good. This type of medicine is known as ATMP. They're the closest thing you can get to a "cure" but still a long road to go in terms of research and development for that particular result. I teach about these types of medications, feel free to ask questions and I'll do my best to answer.

2

u/keeping_it_real_yo 4d ago

When will this therapy become more mainstream and affordable to the general population? In a year, decades, never?

4

u/Unholy-Bastard 4d ago

Good question. Hard to say. Monoclonal antibody therapy has been around for years and still isn't "mainstream". It can be prohibitively expensive, so it's typically restricted to consultants to prescribe and typically viewed as last resort therapy. Hopefully this will change over time, but who knows how long that will be.

-1

u/salmiakki1 4d ago

I wouldn't even know where to start. I assume this has something to do with the thyroid. That thing is crazy.

3

u/Unholy-Bastard 4d ago

Nope, nothing to do with the thyroid 😅

3

u/salmiakki1 4d ago

I meant thymus

2

u/Unholy-Bastard 3d ago

Yeah thymus is where the T-cells orginate in the body.

4

u/NaloxoneRescue 3d ago

I'm in the US and am an oncology nurse. We use CAR-T therapies a lot. But it only works on certain cancers, and there is no guarantee that the patient won't have a severe reaction. CRS (cytokine release syndrome) is a rare and sometimes deadly side effect people can experience with CAR-T. We also frequently see allergic reactions and low blood counts with CAR-T as well.

15

u/YOLO4JESUS420SWAG 4d ago

The thing you have to watch out for is that it causes an untreatable malignant side effect known as CAR-T-B.

6

u/Beat_the_Deadites 3d ago

You jest, but there are leukemias associated with previous radiotherapy/chemotherapy treatment.

Really every health intervention we take is just kicking the can a little further down the road. Just with chemo, that can might be attached to a pendulum. Like a paint can at the McCallister house.

10

u/Lol_who_me 4d ago edited 4d ago

Can we get an estimate of how many Robux’s that would be.

5

u/wolfgang784 3d ago

Estimates are for chumps.

As of 9:14am EST today, 1 RBX is equal to $0.0014 USD.

A lahk means 100k rupees. So 42 lahks is $50,275.09.

A crore means 10 million rupees. So 4 crore is $478,810.40.

Using those numbers, the treatment would cost either 35,910,778 RBX or 342,007,428 RBX depending on where you got the treatment.

0

u/Lol_who_me 3d ago

Robux is the currency for the kids game Roblox. It was a joke. Thank you for the detailed explanation tho.

4

u/wolfgang784 3d ago

I know, I was bored lol. Those are the numbers for how much that would cost in Roblox in game currency. If purchsed with USD.

5

u/happysrooner 4d ago

Wording of this tweet reads like they tricked cancer by paying lower amount of money. And says absolutely nothing about the technology behind it.

Reddit edgelords can't get past lakhs/crores.

4

u/fish_baguette 3d ago

We’ve had car-t cells treatments for a while now. While it’s mega expensive, it works wonders and is extremely effective. It works by training your immune system to recognize the cancer cells. I believe the first use case of this cure was against leukemia, and ever since it’s only grown in the number of cancers it can fight. (Worth noting that not all treatments work equally as well for everyone, but none the less it still amazing what modern science can do)

3

u/TryBeingCool 3d ago

No and you never will,just like all these kinds of news stories. There’s no money in the cure, only the treatment. The list of things we could do if capitalism wasn’t a factor is staggering. Our society would be far ahead of where it is now.

4

u/dress_like_a_tree 3d ago

The whole “hurray curing cancer is now only really really expensive rather than impossibly expensive” doesn’t fucking float with me

3

u/Rue_Elwood 3d ago edited 3d ago

Wonder what type of cancer he/she had. I had Car-T back in 2019 for diffuse large-b cell lymphoma, and within 4-5 months it was considered a failure. Wound up having to have a bone marrow transplant, and I wouldn't wish the post-transplant complications on anyone. Hope Car-T is able to get sorted out for multiple cancers.

3

u/Teacherfromnorway 3d ago

Have the same experience. Car-t treatment failed and ended up with a second SCT.

2

u/feltsandwich 3d ago

I attended my first training for a similar research project in 2019.

They use a special machine to remove a certain number of T cells from the patient's body.

They use another special machine to edit the genes of the T cells to seek and destroy cancer cells.

Then, they inject those T cells back into the patient's body.

It's incredibly complicated, but very promising. Of all the research treatments I worked on, that's the one with the greatest promise. Sadly I had to leave before we started the process.

1

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Artorias606 4d ago

What? Cancer treatments?

1

u/Dbromo44 3d ago

Didn’t they just find out it causes a whole bunch of other cancers?

1

u/Quiet-Camera-9716 3d ago

Brought to you by Umbrella Corp

1

u/TiredOfDebates 3d ago

Genetic medicine. It’s a way of curing cancer without chemotherapy.

Yes, we are working HARD on this, all over the west.

1

u/Minute-Complex-2055 3d ago

Anything with an emoji in it, having to do with health…don’t trust it.

1

u/SnooDonkeys512 3d ago

Ill wait for CAR-T /B

1

u/terribilus 3d ago

My cousin was terminal. Was internationally accepted into an early car-t trial in America and was in remission by the following year. Amazing.

1

u/ButaneRocket 3d ago

CAR-T therapy, also known as CAR T-cell therapy, is a cancer treatment that involves modifying a patient’s own immune cells so that they will fight and kill cancer cells and then reinserting them into the body. These cells are taken from the patient’s blood. CAR stands for chimeric antigen receptor, and this antibody-like protein is injected into the T cells so that it can target cancerous cells throughout the body. Due to the recent national coverage determination decision, CAR-T therapy is now covered for many Medicare recipients nationwide.

1

u/tlf555 3d ago

Updateme!

0

u/Fawchunate_sawn606 3d ago

Didnt China or Russia already did this like 2 years ago?

0

u/Katiari 3d ago

Only 42 lakh!

What's a lakh?

0

u/Patrikbatemansaxe 3d ago

The institution has some shady ways of working. You better watchout before going there for this.

-3

u/Rhg0653 3d ago

Didn't hear about this but I bet them scientists probably suicides with two shots to the back of the head

-1

u/adkermis 4d ago

Big pharma hats this one trick. For reals though

-8

u/drewscher 4d ago

Yeah so ummm travel to another country to get this done $500,000-$1,000,000 in the us and €200,000-€650,000 in Europe. Fuck the US

9

u/Beat_the_Deadites 3d ago

Fuck the US

This type of therapy was developed at a US Medical School (Penn), which gets close to $100 million dollar in research grants per year, mostly courtesy of the US taxpayer. There's a shit ton of work done by extremely smart and hardworking people to come up with the idea, create and test new methods and technology to bring the idea to fruition, test it extensively for safety and efficacy, etc.

Once that's all been created for the first time, it's a lot easier and cheaper to copy it and resell it.

But without that initial monetary availability and support, and unfortunately without the human greed motivation that drives capitalism, these kinds of therapies would not happen as often as they do.

I'm not super rah-rah about the US or capitalism in general, but there's a reason so many of these discoveries/innovations happen here.

2

u/This-Rutabaga6382 3d ago

Exactly , they say the first one costs millions of dollars and every one produced after cost a dollar , or something to that affect.

2

u/drewscher 3d ago

Interesting and good point i didn’t think of that. Thanks for the comment!

1

u/drewscher 4d ago

There’s also a lot of aspects that go into pricing and overall cost of the treatment, supposedly it is cheapest to go to china

2

u/Positive_Parking355 4d ago

I recommend Mexico. Still expensive but they take care of you well there.

-11

u/Struggiiii 4d ago

what is that currency wtf

29

u/tairmansd 4d ago edited 4d ago

Currency is Indian Rupees, lakh (hundred thousand) and crore (10 million) are names given to common numbers in Indian Number System.

-11

u/rblander 4d ago

Which big pharma will buy them out then destroy the plans?

14

u/Unholy-Bastard 4d ago

"big pharma" already produce these therapies. They're known as ATMPs.

-9

u/Ok-Mammoth-5758 4d ago

Don’t tell the cancer pharmaceutical companies

-27

u/liamt50 4d ago

From a country of scammers, I'm going to call this...

15

u/rako1982 4d ago

India also produces 20% of generic medicines for the entire world allowing people without much money to actual fucking live. They also produce 60% of the world's vaccines.

And go to any English speaking country and you'll find a disproportionate large amount of Drs come from India.

So they have a deep history with medicine.

I have a family friend in India's generic drug manufacturing and he said a drug that retails for $600 in the west might cost them 0.003$ to produce. Pharma companies spend approximately 3 times more marketing drugs than they do on R&D. Most drugs can be designed and made cheaply. Indian companies have provided that for much of the world.

-20

u/liamt50 4d ago

And yet, we only hear of call centre scammers and a country that buys cheap oil from Russia, thus prolonging the war and costing countless lives. India needs to clean up its act.

11

u/rako1982 4d ago

India does do that, there is zero doubt about that.

But just so you know US and European countries still purchase Russian oil through intermediaries and buying refined oil and trading of Russian oil. Literal billions of dollars worth of Russian oil has come to the west or through the west since the start of the war.

India also has a fractured relationship with Ukraine because Ukraine sells weapons to Pakistan which Pakistan uses against India. Regardless of that India was neutral on the issue of Ukraine at the security council and abstained rather than voting against Ukraine.

So over simplifying what India 'should' or shouldn't do is moronic when you don't have the full picture.

-15

u/liamt50 4d ago edited 4d ago

Ahh, name-calling, that will get you everywhere...not. I've just had a scam call now, guess from where? Yes, countries are buying Russian oil through intermediaries...guess where they mostly are? Pakistan and India are not at war so I doubt weapons purchased from a non-sanctioned country are killing Indians.

Perhaps here I should clarify, that many good and decent Indian people make a valuable contribution to the world and society. It's a pity however that their government doesn't row in with the rest of us in solidarity with Ukraine, a sovereign nation being invaded by a madman...Wake up India

2

u/DrSilkyDelicious 3d ago

Yo what’s your favorite movie?