the drug, kymriah, also comes with a colossal but secret price tag. while its “scientific ingenuity is marvellous,” mcgill university biological scientist jonathan jarry recently wrote, the therapy, at potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars per dose, is also raising “the age-old question: what is the price of a human life?”
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sick kids and montreal’s sainte-justine hospital were part of a global trial published last year in the new england journal of medicine that reported an overall remission rate of 81 percent with at least three months of follow-up in children and adults given a single infusion of tisagenlecleucel (the generic name for kymriah) who otherwise had no chance for cure. “we want to believe, although i think it’s probably too early to say for sure, that those children are cured,” whitlock said.
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