Surgery Godfather
Chapter 1174 - 925 Brainwashing

Chapter 1174: Chapter 925 Brainwashing

New drugs, especially those that are particularly effective in treating tumors, tend to be extremely expensive, and there’s no way around it because the research and development costs for new drugs are exceedingly high. Pharmaceutical companies invest vast sums in the R&D of new drugs, and the risks are also extremely high.

In the pharmaceutical industry, there’s a "rule of thirty" regarding the R&D of new drugs: on average, it takes 10 years, costs 1 billion US dollars, and the success rate is less than 10%.

Take, for instance, the investments in the development of the latest cancer and immune drugs. Someone has calculated that, among 20 new drug samples, the average investment amounts to a staggering 4.46 billion US dollars.

Given such large investments, such high risks, and such long development cycles, no one would be willing to take on such a task without sufficient profit incentives. Once a new drug hits the market, its price is inevitably extremely high, as pharmaceutical companies need to recoup their costs as quickly as possible, rather than earning money slowly over time.

For example, when new cancer drugs hit the market, pharmaceutical companies never initially considered the poor as their customers. They only wanted to recoup and earn money quickly from the rich.

Despite being vilified by the entire world, it’s undeniable that without these Western pharmaceutical giants leading the way, other companies would not even have a product to copy. Without the original research drugs, there wouldn’t be any cheap generics.

The current market competition mechanism for new drugs and medical devices, despite its many flaws, is also relatively reasonable. Currently, there is no alternative mechanism in place.

At 1.2 million yuan per injection, Axicabtagene Ciloleucel Injection belongs to CAR-T cell therapy. It is a cell therapy product that Fosun Kite Company has brought into China by introducing American technology, and thus it is relatively cheap. It is also the first cell therapy product in China.

Currently, there are 5 CAR-T cell therapy products on the market worldwide, namely Kymriah, Yescarta, Tecartus, Breyanzi, and Abecma. Among these drugs, Kymriah is the most expensive, priced at 4.75 million US dollars in the United States and 31.3 million yen in Japan.

CAR-T is not produced in a standardized assembly line but is a personalized cell therapy method that requires the production of CAR-T cells for each individual patient.

The preparation process is demanding, with strict quality control and testing required throughout. The entire preparation process takes about one month.

Ordinary immune T cells are extracted from the patient’s body and shipped to the Laboratory using a cold chain transport system. In the Laboratory, the patient’s T cells are modified using genetic engineering technology to form CAR-T cells. These CAR-T cells are then massively expanded, and after strict quality control and testing, they are returned to the hospital via cold chain and injected into the patient.

Once inside the patient’s body, when CAR-T cells encounter tumor cells expressing the corresponding antigen, the CAR-T cells get activated and expanded, exerting their powerful specific killing power to eliminate the tumor cells.

The training cost of the workers who manufacture CAR-T cells is also expensive, averaging 300,000 yuan per worker, which highlights the high cost.

Yang Ping has his own ideas. His personal research and development capabilities are strong, and he can, on his own strength, push the entire medical industry forward. However, he absolutely cannot destroy the industry’s healthy competitive mechanism. Once this mechanism is ruined, by the time he is old, the entire pharmaceutical market will be chaotic and dysfunctional. Rebuilding such a dynamic mechanism would take a long time.

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In the System Space Laboratory, Yang Ping had three experiments running simultaneously, thanks to the rewards of 13 CNS papers and the establishment of the Journal "Medical" system, where the massive points allowed Yang Ping to conduct three surgeries at the same time.

In the large Laboratory space, Yang Ping divided it into three sections. The research on the K factor in the Tumor Laboratory was going smoothly. According to Yang Ping’s experimental steps: find the K factor—analyze the K factor—synthesize the K factor—use the K factor. Now that the third step has been completed, entering the fourth step, the K factor can be synthesized artificially. The experiment had reached the final and most difficult step, and only by completing this step, there was a possibility for the K factor to enter clinical trials.

Yang Ping named this method of killing tumors K Therapy, also known as Cell Apoptosis Therapy.

CAR-T Therapy is a cellular therapy that uses the principles of immunity, modifying the body’s own T cells.

Yang Ping’s K Therapy, however, uses the cell’s own apoptosis mechanism. By controlling the apoptosis mechanism in tumor cells, it initiates the apoptosis program in tumor cells, thereby killing them.

If previous tumor-targeted therapies began externally, precisely identifying tumor cells and then employing various methods to kill them,

Yang Ping’s K Therapy starts from inside the tumor cells. It makes tumor cells realize on their own to initiate the self-destruct program and collectively commit suicide, a natural way for the body to eliminate "rebellious" cells.

Yang Ping modified the K factor in various ways, allowing it to safely navigate the blood circulation and eventually combine with the tumor cells, triggering the apoptosis program in the tumor cells.

The cost of trial and error is colossal. Yang Ping made a modification and then ran a test. Repeating this process over and over, no matter how much time was consumed in System Space, the time converted to reality was negligible.

If this trial and error process were to occur in a real Laboratory, it would be incredibly time and labor-consuming. For instance, the initial discovery of monoclonal antibody drugs required searching for one antibody out of a library of 10 billion, or even 100 billion antibodies, through a process of sequential screening, and eventually producing a monoclonal antibody. This process involves at least 1000 steps, and not a single step can afford to go wrong.

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