Even only taking salaries into account, you've got the surgeons and all associated staff in the removal of the tumour. The guys in the lab to cultivate the white blood cells, everyone who needs to fill out paperwork, more surgery, monitoring and check ups.
Then add into that all the costs of running a hospital, proprietary medication, regulatory compliance, cost of all the single disposables.
The costs very quickly add up to a few hundred thousand before anyone's even taken a profit.
I presume the incremental cost of treating each additional patient will be considerably smaller once the overheads of treating the first person are made.
Not necessarily. Even in regular use, this treatment will still involve killing off the patient's immune system, which will require days in hospital isolation. In addition, the culturing and screening of the immune cells to create a population that is primed to fight cancer is a labor-intensive process that has to be done for every patient.
