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Comment by iguy | Hacker News Reader

What is this money spent on? Is it a real cost per dose, or just a made-up number for something made in a research lab?

Maybe another way to ask is: On the scale from 400k of white-shoe lawyer-hours, to 400k of custom 7nm silicon-etching, where should I mentally place this? The former isn't going to budge, the latter will cost pennies in a generation's time.

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Ha! The technology itself is cheap, fabricating a bunch of de novo mRNA is only a few hundred dollars these days. I’m not sure how much volume is needed for treatment, and there’s obviously much stricter QA/QC that must happen for human use, but still the actual manufacturing part is likely no more than single digit thousands per dose. At scale, per your semiconductor analogy, could likely be brought down to single-digit dollars with time.

What they charge might be made up, but the costs of developing these drugs are astronomical. My wife is a cancer research scientist in immunotherapies and she can burn through tens of thousands of dollars in materials running a single experiment. And if she makes a mistake - the money is wasted!

For sure, I don't mean to suggest it's cheap research. But whether you charge a lot or nothing for the first few doses out of the lab, it seems like this won't really make a dent in the research cost. (I don't know if this $375,000 number is in that category, or not.)

If the cost for every individual treatment is low, then the cost per treatment gets lower with more patients that can benefit from it.

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