In 1941, Albert Alexander, an Oxford policeman, became the first patient treated with penicillin. He was dying from an infected scratch. Within a day, he was sitting up. But the world's entire supply was a few spoonfuls, brewed in laboratory bedpans. His doctors recovered the drug from his urine and gave it back to him. On the fifth day, it ran out. He died.
Eighty-five years later, we can trace sickle cell disease to one broken letter in a person's DNA, edit their own blood stem cells to work around it, and return those cells as medicine. Casgevy is the first approved treatment to do this. Its US list price is $2.2 million.
Medicine changed. The system for making it did not. Between a discovery and a patient lie years of reconstruction. A process that works in one laboratory is rebuilt in a factory, then rebuilt again in the next. Its proof begins almost from zero each time. Every step is recorded, reviewed, and signed by hand.
That system was built for pills: one process, repeated a million times. A medicine grown from a patient's own cells is one process, run for one person. When the proof starts over, so does the wait.
We are building one system that carries the process and its proof forward—from laboratory to factory, from one dose to the next—so the medicine gets there before time runs out.