Right.
But, @Darren_Garrison’s post which revived this thread said:
The drug he needs is radioactive and called Pluvicto. But it contains Lutetium-177, not Plutonium. (Should be called Luvicto?) Appears to be a rare and expensive drug not for artificial scarcity reasons but for real scarcity reasons:
But, the scarcity of Lutetium has little to do with the price of the drug.
These nice folks make a lot of the radioactives used as drugs or implants or whatever: Cyclotron Facility & Nuclear Pharmacy - Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology - WashU Medicine.
Back in the day I worked from that airline hub and we very often carried radioactives to destinations all over the country. By “often” I mean dozens of shipments per day every day. For any given crew it was a couple / few times a month. But it was utterly routine.
Lots of that stuff has a very brief shelf-life. In the interest of minimizing the residual hazard, you make it decay fast by choosing an energetic substance. Then you moderate / modulate the total dose by not including very much radioactive ingredient. So the target gets a relatively quick, relatively intense zap, then pretty quickly nothing thereafter.
Here’s what a packaged dose of the stuff looks like
I don’t understand; why wouldn’t it?
There are two ways of producing LU-177.
One of them starts the Lu, and one of them doesn’t.
So, the price of Lu doesn’t really matter for the 2nd method.
But - either process is pretty expensive.
Yep, this is the part that matters. I work on radiopharmaceutical patents, so I’ve seen a lot of stuff about this, and it’s all expensive. As discussed, these isotopes have fairly short half-lives, so they can’t really be stockpiled, so they’re made in small daily or weekly batches.
They’re either made in a large central facility, and then packaged and shipped as described above, or they’re made locally, often in the actual hospital, for specific treatments. So you either pay for a large facility, and pay for shipping all over the world, shipping that has to be on time or the effectiveness is lost, or you pay for smaller facilities in multiple locations.
And those facilities are complex, expensive systems. Not only do they need to maintain normal medical sterility, they also have to maintain proper radioactive containment systems. Every stage of the process needs shielded systems, and people trained on proper procedures.
And it’s not just radioactive handling, there’s also a lot of chemical processing involved in some of the production systems. And the materials they use to extract one isotope from the others can be nasty. We’re talking acids and the like. So you also need proper procedures for than kind of work. Picture a lab that has to follow every rule of a medical facility, a chemical processing facility, and a nuclear facility, all in the basement of your local hospital. Now imagine paying for it!
And then you have to update it for every new radiopharmaceutical that comes around, because while they do have some similarities, there are also key differences. A setup that makes X might not work to make Y, at least not without some important alterations.
From last Spring:
I thought a cartoonist, of all people, would be a little more diligent about deadlines.
Honestly, I can’t fault the man for putting this one off.
As long as the GoFundMe is working, why not keep blowing the deadline?
So here’s a multimillionaire with an aggressive form of cancer trying to get his insurance to pay for the treatment? While that’s all very entertaining, I’m pretty sure if I had a shit load if money I’d buy the damn treatment and worry about the paperwork after I was cured.
It sounds like he has metastatic prostate cancer, and “cure” is probably not in the cards; the Pluvicto is likely to just slow the disease’s progression, and give him a little more time.
Even so, it doesn’t sound like the issue is that Adams can’t afford the treatment; it’s that his insurer has approved paying for the treatment, but that the healthcare provider is having difficulty getting the drug.
In a study Pluvicto increased average survival rate from 11 months to 15 months. So “little” is the appropriate term.
Just two months to become a bandwagon pick. Handbasket is waiting at the station.
I just wish he’d get on with it.
Maybe he’s hoping to posthumously replace Charlie Kirk as the MAGA Martyr of the Month.
And, back in May, as mentioned in the OP, Adams said that he would be “gone by summer.” We don’t know at what point his doctors started treating him with Pluvicto (including whether he was already on it back in May). So, yeah.
Of course, this doesn’t mean the mode survival increase is 4 months. It could be that this treatment simply doesn’t work on many patients, but some get 2-4 more years or whatever. PErsonally, I’d give it a shot. May as well swing for the fences.
As George Carlin put it, “That’s the point of life. Not dying.”
I get no joy out of the man dying and don’t comprehend why people in this thread seem to. He is a human being, and he’s suffering and likely very scared.
You get out of life what you put into it, if you are lucky.
Either Adams is unlucky, or he has put very little into life.
I don’t believe in karma. People don’t get or avoid cancer because they deserve it.
Yeah, cancer is just bad luck. Even if you are a heavy smoker who worked with asbestos, your odds of lung cancer are less than 50%, and most people with cancer didn’t do anything obvious to increase their risks
I have no love for Adams, but i don’t wish him to die painfully. And at this phase of his life, I’m not especially worried about what damage he’ll do to the rest of us, either. I hope he finds peace in what’s left of his life.