r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jul 08 '26

Society Bryan Johnson, the millionaire biohacker who wants to live forever, diagnosed with incurable autoimmune disease

https://www.techspot.com/news/113035-bryan-johnson-millionaire-biohacker-who-wants-live-forever.html
16.2k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

63

u/Towel4 Jul 08 '26

Very soon? You can do it right now.

The Sickle Cell product is called "Lyfgenia", it's sister product for Beta Thalassemia is called Zynteglo, these are both by BlueBird Bio (now "Genetix"). There's another company called Vertex doing a product called Casgevy.

I work with these products for a living. Yes, it is insanely expensive as the 5th most expensive drug in the world. No, patients do not pay that price tag for it, the insurance does. Yes, the insurance pays for it, because they actually save money in the long run.

Super cool stuff.

12

u/FirefighterTrick6476 Jul 08 '26

Very soon as in soon we're actually have access to it. Sorry I'm German. We have a very shitty process of integrating new medications into our Healthcare system

3

u/Towel4 Jul 08 '26

We actually had a German patient travel to us for Lyfgenia... that's a wild.

For the record, I'm on the care end based in a hospital, I don't work for these companies.

Either way, this stuff is crazy cool, and is expanding very fast. I'm hoping you see some progress on approval in Germany soon!

1

u/FirefighterTrick6476 Jul 08 '26

ngl now do the same thing for MCAS and I will also hop into the plane ASAP lol

1

u/phyrros Jul 08 '26

I work with these products for a living. Yes, it is insanely expensive as the 5th most expensive drug in the world. No, patients do not pay that price tag for it, the insurance does. Yes, the insurance pays for it, because they actually save money in the long run.

They only save money if they value the remaining life of the patient as higher than the procedual cost. Thus the vast majority of patients won't have access to it. They can't even afford bone marrow transplants after all.

5

u/Towel4 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

>They only save money if they value the remaining life of the patient as higher than the procedural cost

The math is literally as straight forward as yearly cost of care (admissions, red cell exchanges and infusions, complications like acute chest, cost of medications, etc) for literally decades. Those numbers reach 3.5M very fast.

Yes, there is continued cost of care after the therapy, but these companies do save money over a lifetime of care, and the only thing they care about is money.

Who is they? Plenty of people are being transplanted all the time, marrow and peripheral blood stem cells, both allo and auto, even without insurance.

2

u/phyrros Jul 08 '26

They is the vast majority of people with sickle cell disease - black people in SA and Africa.

And in PPP terms those 3,5 million are akin to  100 million to almost a billion in Africa. 

1

u/Canisa Jul 08 '26

literally decades

I think the issue being raised is that an older patient who doesn't have decades left for the treatment cost to amortise might not be offered it by their insurance if the insurer doesn't see a good 'investment' in that case.

1

u/phyrros Jul 08 '26

yes, this will happen also in the first world but i was talking about the poorer parts of thr world

1

u/jabba-thederp Jul 08 '26

Lol

The incentive is to keep a paying customer sending them money over time. Not to kill their cash cow. That "over time" part is worth so much more than an immediate short term saving.

1

u/phyrros Jul 08 '26

hmmm, if i just use nigera as example:  In ppp terms the costs would be north of 100 million dollars - there are simply very few customers with that lifetime income