Surely he’s not the only patient who it’s produced for.
With such a short half-life and high price ($27,000 per dose) it probably is made with specific patients in mind. It definitely can’t be stocked away.
It seems odd that a medication with such tight restrictions & astronomical price has a fairly extensive marketing campaign. I see the commercials somewhat frequently on Jeopardy & NFL games.
I didn’t know it had a marketing campaign. I had never heard of it until yesterday.
In researching my earlier post I saw the number of $27,000 a dose, but looking again I also see a quote of $42,500 per dose wholesale.
Treatment is up to 6 doses spaced 6 weeks apart.
Just google pluvicto commercials, there are a few. Apparently you need to wear a condom to protect your partner from your radioactiveness. It probably glows without a UV light now.
Kaiser Permanente said its nuclear medicine and oncology experts have treated more than 150 patients with Pluvicto since the FDA first approved it in 2022.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/dilbert-trump-kaiser-21134567.php
That is weird, advertising a drug used on 50 people a year.
ETA it turns out that the SFC edited the quote in a deceptive way. Fox News lists more of it:
“Since it was approved by the FDA three years ago, Kaiser Permanente’s nuclear medicine and medical oncology experts have treated more than 150 patients with Lu-177 PSMA (Pluvicto) in Northern California alone. We know this drug and this disease.”
So 150 just in Northern California, not 150 total.
Since Lutetium is so rare, one would think that collecting a patient’s urine and re-processing it would be worthwhile.
They’re trying to steal my essence!
Except the form that’s used decays quickly. Presumedly, they need to make new radioactive material for each patient.
The 177Lu used in the drug is actually not a natural element, so it must be produced by bombarding some other element with probably protons or alpha particles.
It is produced by neutron activation, so it requires an energetic neutron source.
Stranger
And, that’s the deal, right?
It’s made from Ytterbium, which isn’t particularly rare or expensive. So, the whole “Lutetium is really, really rare and and expensive, which is why this drug is so costly” is kind of a lie…
Is this guy dead yet? If he could be right about anything I want it to be this.
I’m no nuclear physicist, but I can’t imagine neutron activation is a cheap process, and the fact you’ve got to get the finished medication into the patient within a few day window can’t help either.
Looking it up, it can be made from Ytterbium, but that process has its own problems, that makes it hard to compete with the process involving directly making it from 177Lu isotopes. So it would be expensive either way.
ETA: anyone who really wants to know what the production difficulties are, can read this, which compares the two main methods.
No, it kind of isn’t. IT’s NOT ytterbium. It may be made from it, but it’s a very, very expensive process.
My computer’s processor is made of sand, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap to produce.
Yb is less than an order of magnitude more common than the stable isotope of Lu. All the lanthanides are found in “misch metal” ores, in relatively tiny quantities, so they have to be separated from each other. Being different elements, it may be possible to use chemical separation processes (unlike isotopes of a single element, which are chemically identical and have to be spun apart) but the separation is not particularly easy.
So Adams’ life depends on a promise made by Donald Trump.
I’ve got my first pick for 2026.