Ugh, those dumb "withholding the cure" conspiratorial tropes. Have you looked at infamous asset striping companies and corporate raiders? Or even the short-term

Ugh, those dumb "withholding the cure" conspiratorial tropes. Have you looked at infamous asset striping companies and corporate raiders? Or even the short-termism of most companies? They don't think beyond optimizing next quarter share price and this is the default the business model of a publicly traded company which bucks the trend is noted when describing a company and not the other way around. That is a 0-bit compression case. There is thus absolutely no shortage of people who are willing to burn perfectly profitable companies for big enough short term gain. In this case they would wind up eating an entire submarket. I think orders of magnitude more qualifies as a temptation. The situation is also inherently a prisoner's dilemma - pharmaceutical companies know that they are not special and that anything they let sit quietly buried may be discovered by another company who may benefit from the short term cash. This is before getting into how immensely valueable the "ashes" are for any company who goes the cure route successfully. They have a reputational premium and have a collective team whose appraised value has risen. Given the choice between your average team of X years of experience and a disease curing team with X years of experience guess which one would appraise higher in share prices by a considerable margin?