More than a quarter of the new medicines approved in the United States last year were designated for rare or so-called orphan diseases. While that’s good news for people suffering from these conditions, the price tags can be overwhelming: The new gene therapy for lipoprotein lipase deficiency is likely to cost more than $1 million per patient when it goes on sale in Europe this summer. Increasingly, healthcare providers are having to balance the acute needs of the few against the wider interests of society, within constrained budgets.
View the original article here: Are we entering the age of $1 million medicine?
