Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs has long focused on making generic drugs cheaper, but the company is now testing a very different category: custom medicines for single patients with rare genetic diseases. According to STAT, the first shipments of DNA-like molecules designed around individual mutations have started arriving at Cost Plus's Dallas factory.
One shipment was crafted by California chemists to address a mutation destroying a single patient's neurons. Another came from work with Dutch researchers aimed at a rare disease that causes adults to progressively lose muscle control. These are the company's first experiments with so-called n-of-1 treatments, which are tailored to one person rather than a broad patient population.
Cuban said in an email that helping these patients was an obvious opportunity. The move could put Cost Plus at the center of a small but growing effort to make bespoke rare-disease therapies more accessible, though the article does not disclose pricing or how many such treatments the company plans to produce.