The million-dollar drug: How a Canadian medical breakthrough that was thirty years in the making became the world’s most expensive drug — and then quickly disappeared

"It's not a crazy price," he said. "People say it's the most expensive drug in the world and what have you, but in the end, all of these products, even priced at $1 million, are going to be generally cheaper than replacement therapy."
Replacement therapy refers to drug treatments that replace missing proteins rather than repairing defective genes. Unlike Glybera, most replacement therapies must be given for the rest of a patient's life. Many of those drugs cost more than $300,000 per patient per year.

I can see their reasoning here. After all the treatment only requires 1 dose of the drug and you're set for life. It can be thought of as taking the drug for 20 years, divide 1 million by 20 and you get 50k a year. Which is not really that crazy.

Also you need to consider that LPLD is a very rare disease, so the company who sells Glybera will have very few customers. It's really hard to stay profitable or at least break even without pricing the drug really high.
In a perfect world the government should be the one who is funding these kinds of drugs.

I wonder if this drug is patented? If not then it could be picked up by different companies, and through competition it's price will hopefully drop to an affordable value.

Very interesting article!