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You don't think you can make money from a cancer cure and cure cancer at the same time?
by egfx 7y ago
You don't think you can make money from a cancer cure and cure cancer at the same time?
- aspaceman 7y agoNo. They said the exact opposite of that.
- ohithereyou 7y agoNot OP, but no - the profit motive is the main perverter of the pharmaceutical industry. By talking a profit you ensure that your cancer treatment will not cure cancer - too few people will have access to cure the disease and millions will still suffer and die needlessly. I guess a few rich, first worlders would live, so it's not all bad. People celebrate Jonahs Salk because not only did he develop the polio vaccine but he rejected his opportunity to massively profit from it because it was more important that patients have access. No company that develops a cancer cure these days would do that. Their shareholders would revolt, their boards would fire their exeutives, their stock prices would plunge, and their competitors would pile on.
- perl4ever 7y agoWhat to do if you have a cure is an imaginary problem. Regulators set minimum standards for efficacy which involve a treatment being just barely statistically significant. The problem is not burying cures, because playing the game of "make believe a treatment is better than placebo" is infinitely simpler than coming up with a cure. The cures people believe in are like the infamous 200 mpg carburetor.
- zadkey 7y agoI'm pretty sure he's making reference to the large pharmaceutical companies that earn more by treating problems than fixing them. The incentive is to continuously charge these people for the rest of their life. They make more money if you stay sick, so they can keep treating you. If you are cured, then the flow of money stops until you get sick again.
- habitue 7y agoPeople always state this like it's some dirty secret, but it's an ongoing calculation for any given pharmaceutical company. If they think a cure is within reach, then they try to go for it, because if they focus purely on treatment and a competitor discovers an easily findable cure, then they make no money on the treatment. If, however, after a lot of work, a cure seems elusive, it makes sense to focus on treatment. Both for the sinister reason that people pay more over a lifetime for treatments, but also for the less sinister reason that it's usually much easier to develop treatments than cures, and having a treatment and not having a cure is strictly better than not having a treatment and also not having a cure.
- zadkey 7y agoSure but, What is stopping them from discovering a cure, patenting it, and then never manufacturing it?
- akiselev 7y agoMany countries would ignore the patent and manufacture it, driving people to medical tourism, and then the patent will expire in 18-23 years anyway.
- habitue 7y agoPatents run out and they are made public. If you go through the expensive process of developing a drug, you're likely to want to get a return on that. If there is enough evidence for the cure to work that a company wants to bury it, they're more likely to not patent it. Also, this presupposes that the companies are actively trying to do evil. In reality, most people would rather have cancer cured than not cured. The profit motive can bend these incentives, but I think the caricature of a company full of amoral sociopaths making decisions to maximize human suffering are kind of... unrealistic.
- vanusa 7y agoEven if you could -- the statements "can make money doing X" does not imply "can build an MVP for X".