I was doing some research in my lab last year, when I noticed that even a small drop of blood completely eliminated cancer from one of my mice. I continued to do some testing, and then more testing, and then even more. People tend to think of cancer as a single disease, but there are really many different types of cancer. They’re often caused by different mutations and other factors, and so each kind requires its own treatment, or so I thought. I found that my treatment seemed to work on every type of cancer I could find. Moreover, I couldn’t find any side effects.
I’ve since conducted numerous trials, and while I can’t seem to synthesize the cure, I can produce it from a mere drop of blood. Now, it may seem rather inconvenient to have to use my own blood to produce a treatment, but cancer treatments normally cost many thousands of dollars. Even after the cost of producing the cure, I still actually come out ahead.
Perhaps you’d think that I could never make any practical use out of the treatment, since I’d run out of blood. However, people make a lot more blood than some might imagine. You can donate a pint of blood at a time. There’s about 10–12 pints of blood in your body, so one point won’t be missed, so long as you give your body time to regenerate the blood cells. A person can donate blood about once every two months. So that’s 6 pints every year.
But certainly I couldn’t cure that many cases with just 6 pints of blood, right? Sadly it is true that there are a lot of cases diagnosed each year. In fact, there are almost 2 million cases diagnosed every year in the United States. Luckily, some of those cases have treatments already. So I can reserve my blood for the more extreme cases.
Now, a “drop” of blood has a rather specific definition in pharmaceuticals. It’s defined as roughly 0.05ml. That’s over 9,000 doses per pint, or 56,000 treatments per year. That’s enough to cover a lot of the more extreme cases that don’t respond to traditional forms of treatment. While cancer treatments often cost over $10,000 a month, just for the medicine itself, I only charge $250 for the treatment.
The cost of producing the treatment isn’t cheap, and I’ve spent many thousands of dollars developing it. And I’ll have to spend many thousands more to get FDA approval. But that’s still $14 million a year. I can live off of that. And luckily with the promotion of right to try, people can start using my treatment before the FDA fully approves it.
While this discussion is a work of fiction, the stats that I used are correct. Many people need blood, so consider donating. Likewise, there’s still a lot of research that needs to be done to cure different cancers. So consider donating to a charity or cancer treatment organization, such as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
