One of the directors of the $3 billion California stem cell
agency this week commented on the likelihood of very high costs for therapies that
the agency and others are pursuing.
Francisco Prieto, a Sacramento, Ca., physician who has been on the
agency’s governing board since 2004, was responding in connection with this Oct.
8 item on the California Stem Cell Report: “Rosy Outlooks, Stem Cell Therapy,Stunning Costs.”
Prieto said in an email,
“Like any new transformative technology, I expect that stem cell treatments will start out quite expensive and (hopefully) decrease as they become more common and the cost of producing them drops. If some of them are cures (as opposed to treatments), then that cost needs to be weighed against the lifetime cost of treatment that would now be eliminated, as well as the gain in productivity and years of life. Even before you start to factor in the cost in human suffering, I predict they will start to look like a pretty good bargain.”
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