The Human Genome Project to read a full copy of the base pair sequence in one human started out with about 3 Billion dollars in initial funding, and it took a couple of decades to get complete coverage.

However, the technology, techniques and equipment developed to automate the process have massively cut costs and increased speed over that time.

> A new speed record in DNA sequencing may soon help families more quickly find answers to difficult and life-altering questions.

In just 7 hours, 18 minutes, a team of researchers at Stanford Medicine went from collecting a blood sample to offering a disease diagnosis. This unprecedented turnaround time is the result of ultra-rapid DNA sequencing technology paired with massive cloud storage and computing.

https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/022722/record-brea...

You have to crawl before you can run.

We don't have a lot of experience with taking cells out of the human body, processing them, and then putting them back in. A significant amount of the cost, above and beyond the R&D required to develop the treatment and the cost of actually performing the cure, comes from extreme quality control measures that reduce the chances of infection and other problems. Also, you have to basically run a full, certified lab and house it with people qualified to perform the cure.

Everything about this is bespoke (each treatment is based on the individual cells of a patient) and artisanal (the process requires a highly skilled individual to complete), and run by a guild (only so many people are allowed to run gene therapy trials).

On the other hand, since this is a cure, and probably reduces long-term medical care costs, it could very well actually be "cheaper" in the long run, which incentivizes the government to treat as many people as possible.

That's a complicated topic, but the short version is cost of this treatment needs to cover the R&D costs to develop it, plus the costs for all the other failed experiments that didn't work out.

Plus gene therapy is in its infancy, so everything here is going to be novel and expensive. Novel treatments generally have a limited audience with even fewer practitioners, so you can't spread the R&D costs across many patients.

Prices will go down with time as patents expire and competitors emerge and this line of treatment (perhaps) becomes mainline, but that's on a ~20 year timeframe.

Because right now, it's a very bespoke process. Very low supply, with a lot demand.

As more people become proficient at this treatment, the cost will come down. But to truly get it down to reasonable amount will require automation, and we're a long way off from automating crispr.

It’s the price money you get for being the first to bring the cure to patients.

The research and the approval are extremely expensive and risky. Without a boatload of cash at the end of the tunnel, nobody would do it.

Patents will expire and in a generation, this will become cheap.