I’m very sorry for my absence. My son and I fell very sick with a stomach bug and we are finally back rejoining the world. That was rough. Thanks for your patience. Whenever I’m sick I am reminded of the quote: “A healthy person wants a million things. A sick person wants just one.” This made me want to tell the story of the medical therapy ATA188. A month ago I shared the story of an incredible invention that will cure the terrible pain from Sickle Cell Disease. Miraculously, there are now two drugs approved by the FDA that completely cure this disease. It is truly incredible. But we also discussed that the drugs Casgevy and Lyfgenia are priced at $2 million to $3 million per treatment! A shocking price tag to say the least. It’s understandable why someone might look at that price tag and get angry with the company that is selling the products. How dare they charge millions of dollars for something that is supposed to help cure people? This brings up a big hairy question: How much should medical treatments cost? How should they be priced? In the case of these two drugs, the alternative treatment for the patients costs $4 million over a lifetime and doesn’t provide relief from pain. So even at $2-$3million, the new treatment is less expensive, better for the patient, and saves the patient from a lot of ongoing pain. But even so, I can totally understand why someone would still look at the $3 Million price tag and think that the pharmaceutical company that is selling the drug is a money hungry monster. I get it. But not all drugs that are tested are successful like Casgevy and Lyfgenia. Take for instance, ATA188 from Atara Biotherapeutics. ATA188 is an immune therapy designed to treat multiple sclerosis (MS). This therapy is working on the newly developed theory that MS might be caused by the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in someway. This really cool study of over 10,000,000 military personnel showed a strong correlation between EBV and MS. ATA188 hoped to use healthy t-cells to target EBV cells to reduce or halt the progression of MS, offering a new approach to treating this chronic disease. I have two close family members that suffer with MS so I have been following this treatment fairly closely in hopes that it could offer some answers and potentially a solution for my loved one. Year Of The Opposite - Travis Stoliker's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A little history on drug/therapy development: Medical treatments like drugs and immunotherapies like ATA188 usually involve many partners and organizations that work together to test and develop these medical inventions. For ATA188, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute were involved. Atara Biotherapeutics was the company that was commercializing the technology. What does this mean? Well basically the universities are often the ones that invent the new therapy or drug but they aren’t that great at testing, getting FDA approval, and bringing the drug/therapy to market so that patients can buy the product to help them. So usually the Universities partner with a company or a bunch of investors to help get the innovation from the lab into the real world. That’s where a company like Atara Biotherapeutics comes in. Atara enters into a licensing deal with the University and the people that invented ATA188 where, in most cases, the University/Inventor give the company a license to commercialize the invention, and in exchange they get fees and royalties if the product is sold to customers and patients. But, the catch for Atara Biotherapeutics is that now they must pay for the testing and trials that go into getting the drug/therapy approved. This can take a very long time and cost a hell of a lot of money. For instance, the phase 1 trial for ATA188 was way back in 2017. As you may recall, i