Someday, hopefully someday soon, someone will come up with a cure for Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia.

That cure will have been made possible by decades of privately and publicly funded research, and will almost certainly cost over a billion dollars to pass through clinical trials and come to market. Undoubtedly, it will be very expensive for the patient and, in all likelihood, produce a sizable profit for its developer. How would you assess its value?

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, caring for the 5 million patients living with dementia will cost $235 billion in 2016, or $47,200 per person. Given that the average person lives 8-10 years after diagnosis, that’s at least $377,600 in care per patient. Then there are the estimated 18.1 billion hours of time provided by 15 million unpaid caregivers each year. The lost productivity of those 5 million people and their caregivers has to also be considered in the value equation.

Let’s also assume that the purpose of developing that medication is not simply to reduce cost, but to eliminate the untold misery that Alzheimer’s visits upon millions of families around the world. If it produced no direct economic benefit whatsoever, every single one of those people would agree the drug would have delivered exceptionally high value, even if the price of the medication were exceptionally high.

But how high would be too high? If the entire treatment cost half a million dollars, it might be justified on economic grounds alone. Would a premium be justified, or should a discount be applied due to the scale of the profit margin?

Until we reach a common framework for understanding value, this and similar debates will likely go round in circles. Pharmaceutical companies will rightfully assert that the profit motive provides the incentives needed to undergo the risky ventures of developing new treatments, and use that argument to justify a high price. Payers rightfully will assert that the skyrocketing prices of medications are driving costs beyond sustainable levels, and use that to justify driving prices down.

Our hope is to inform that debate using credible science, without taking one side or the other. We are an industry of scientists. We apply scientific principles to the study of value in medicine to achieve a common framework for determining and enhancing value.