David Friedberg says Moderna is charging $500K for a ‘cancer vaccine’ that already exists
"What frustrates me the most about all of this, everyone's kind of lauding this as some unique breakthrough and special and powerful. It's not, a lot of people are going to places like Montana and getting peptides printed for their particular cancer sequence, making their own neo-antigens, and getting cured of their cancer.”
“You can pay someone $50,000 to do this for you today. There's a lot of clinics that will do it. And it's not a special FDA-approved drug. So why is Moderna saying that they're going to charge $500,000 for this?"
"I don't think that this technique, which has been developed through several decades of iteration, funded by NIH and other public funding dollars, should now be patented, FDA-approved, and charged half a million dollars for people to get treated for this."
"A private pharmaceutical company has seen their market cap go from $20 billion to $60 billion because they went through this regulatory process to create what, in my mind, is a form of regulatory capture.”
“They’re making the case that it's all about safety and trials, when fundamentally there's an underlying technique that was funded by a lot of public research dollars that I think should be more open-sourced, more ubiquitous. Every hospital should be trained on how to do this process to treat cancer patients.”