12 ms·

Statins alone are a >$10b annual market, down from $20b annually before Lipitor's patent expired. Pharma companies have proven that curative treatments can be

by nugget 11y ago

Statins alone are a >$10b annual market, down from $20b annually before Lipitor's patent expired. Pharma companies have proven that curative treatments can be priced near the net present value of all future disease management costs, making cures the most lucrative area of pharma (a good thing if it leads to more of them). There are billions of private dollars being sunk into heart disease annually. I'm not sure exactly what Google is after here but $50m is not going to move the needle from a funding or incentive perspective.

tinco 11y ago
The way I understood the Google X moonshot strategy is that they put the money behind some idea that seems farfetched or unorthodox. I fully understand $50M doesn't mean anything to the industry as a whole, but you can't tell me it wouldn't impact any single early-stage idea or research direction. Google is not looking to fund heart disease research in general, they're going to fund one particular potential solution. One that's probably not seeing any of that $20B at this moment. Probably because the idea is farfetched, risky and potentially not financially viable.
randcraw 11y ago
Right. "Heart Disease" is a huge space of medical pathologies, from atherosclerosis to stenosis to cardiomyopathy to abnormal signal creation / propagation to so much more. Hoping to "cure" any one of these is a goal greater than even a giant pharma or major medical research institute would entertain, especially in just 5 years. If creating the average new drug to merely treat a disease usually costs an experienced pharma between $2B and $6B, then $50M quite simply will not "cure heart disease". To suggest otherwise is akin to promising a miracle cure to a dying child's mother. It's either clueless or manipulative. Let's hope that foolish verbiage arose from careless reporting, and not from Google.

by nugget 11y ago

tinco 11y ago

The way I understood the Google X moonshot strategy is that they put the money behind some idea that seems farfetched or unorthodox. I fully understand $50M doesn't mean anything to the industry as a whole, but you can't tell me it wouldn't impact any single early-stage idea or research direction. Google is not looking to fund heart disease research in general, they're going to fund one particular potential solution. One that's probably not seeing any of that $20B at this moment. Probably because the idea is farfetched, risky and potentially not financially viable.

randcraw 11y ago

Right. "Heart Disease" is a huge space of medical pathologies, from atherosclerosis to stenosis to cardiomyopathy to abnormal signal creation / propagation to so much more. Hoping to "cure" any one of these is a goal greater than even a giant pharma or major medical research institute would entertain, especially in just 5 years. If creating the average new drug to merely treat a disease usually costs an experienced pharma between $2B and $6B, then $50M quite simply will not "cure heart disease". To suggest otherwise is akin to promising a miracle cure to a dying child's mother. It's either clueless or manipulative. Let's hope that foolish verbiage arose from careless reporting, and not from Google.