"As it turns out, the drug was discovered with funding provided by the Nati onal Institutes of Health to different institutions, including the Universi ty of Pennsylvania, which partnered with Novartis.
In all, Mitchell and other activists calculate taxpayers provided $200 mill ion to develop the CAR-T technology that is now being used by several compa nies to develop an array of drugs. (The procedure is quite complex: Patient blood cells are extracted and then modified to attack cancer cells before being reinjected into a patient.)
Novartis also received a tax credit equal to half the cost of clinical tria ls, according to Jamie Love of Knowledge Ecology International, a consumer group that tracks access-to-medicine issues. ?When you propose a pr ice like this, it?s incumbent to have more transparency,? h e insisted.
Novartis certainly deserves credit for its efforts to keep pricing fair. An d its shareholders deserve a return on the investment the company made in r esearch and development. But if the company wants to dispel the notion that it will profit excessively on the backs of cancer patients and U.S. taxpay ers, it needs to provide more information."