The reason this treatment development is so cheap is that in China, the biotech firm mentioned in this article, they're able to automate most of the process of the CAR-T therapy manufacturing to as little as one day. The big cost though is the in-patient part of the treatment.
The process, assuming CAR-T is possible as a treatment, the patient gets their blood collected and the CAR-T cell therapy is manufactured, then they undergo Lymphodepletion Chemo, basically working to destroy your immune system for 3-4 days, then the CAR-T cell infusion happens followed by observation for 3-4 weeks.
During that time, the patient will experience really bad fevers and susceptible to infection and other complications that really really really suck, you have no energy and you feel like you're dying. You can't even see your friends and family, everything has to be wiped down, and trained medical staff can only be around you. Anyone that's done a bone marrow transplant for Leukemia, or similar, will know how this treatment works. My friend had to go through it twice because his first transplant ended in rejection. Fortunately the second one worked and he's been cancer free for almost 10 years now.
Then you're there for another 2-4 weeks locally just in case any complications occur like rejection, delayed hyper inflammatory reactions, neurotoxicity syndrome.
With highly targeted cell therapies, AI and manual automation save a lot of time and labor for that specific process, but there's no decoupling the true pain someone will experience going through this therapy. Though the cool thing is that bone marrow treatments are also getting an upgrade, they're moving towards "Universal Donor Cells" or "Allogenic CAR-T" and Autologous Stem Cell Gene Editing. Instead of trying in futility to find the "Perfect Match" 8 out 8 HLA markers, in the future tha'tll be a thing of the past. In fact, you might even develop a bone marrow transplant that's even the same blood type that you had before radiation and chemo to zap your immune system.
The future is bright, but the path is still gonna hurt.