31 August 2017 - Forget McGregor-Mayweather. The biotech world has been waiting for months to hear about Novartis’s pricing decision for Kymriah, its just-approved CAR-T therapy for cancer. 

That interest turned into anxiety days earlier when Gilead announced its purchase of Kite, given that Kite is expected to be the next company to market its own CAR-T treatment and Gilead — rightly or wrongly — is viewed as a company ready to push the envelope on price in service of its shareholders.

So in the past few days, we have learned that McGregor is not Rocky Balboa and that the first CAR-T drug to get to the marketplace has a price of $475,000, a number that is both so large and so lacking in context that it is difficult to determine if it is too high by fivefold or too low by half. (Complicating any analysis, this price tag does not include all of the attendant medical costs that will be incurred when this treatment is administered.)

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