[latj]

We generally arent trying to cure diseases. I mean, individual researchers want to find cures (e.g. the dedicated clinician who went to med school because her mother had breast cancer, the passionate hacker who eschewed private buses and free lunches at some startup to work at a research institute) Generally though, the pressure of the overall system is to make as much money as possible.

If you cure someone's disease, they pay once. If your goal is to make money the optimal path is to manage symptoms but keep customers (i.e. patients) reliant on your treatments, ideally with their life depending on them.

Having said that, there are many people working to find new ways to control mosquito populations, especially with zika being in the news, especially with zika starting to affect the continental U.S. (No one cares when its just American Samoa and Hawaii but Florida is a little too close to home).

I just read an article last week where essentially researchers had designed frankenstein gigolo mosquitoes that would steal your lady, impregnate her, but the resulting bastard frankensteins would die before reaching maturity.

[shoyer]

It is common mistaken belief that drug companies don't have an incentive to find cures.

Cures are actually tremendously profitable. You can charge more money for a cure than drugs for a lifetime of symptom management, because cures result in better outcomes and significant cost savings for the entire healthcare system.

The recent development of cures for Hepatitis C is a perfect case in point. Gilead is pulling in $10B+/year in revenue from these drugs. There has been plenty of outrage about how much Sovaldi costs, but it's still way cheaper than a liver transplant.

That said, you're probably right that it would be difficult to profit directly off of exterminating mosquitoes. That's exactly that sort of research that governments should (and do) fund (search for "gene drives").

[Retric]

Even that fails in comparison to preventing disease. Drugs you give to heathy people for decades are a huge Win-Win. And even vaccines represent a vast and stable market.

[marxidad]

Does anyone actually make the conscious decision to avoid curing diseases because of its limited profitability?

[martincmartin]

Sure, there are all sorts of rare diseases that could be cured, but there's no money to do the research. People have fundraisers to try to make it profitable, e.g. [1]

[1] http://www.finleyfighters.com/

[Houshalter]

Well that's because the diseases are rare. Regardless of profit, it makes no sense to work on a drug that will save 20 lives, when you could work on one that saves 200 lives.

Another part of the problem is that the cost of getting drugs approved is ridiculously high.

[bsenftner]

Doubtful one person, but a board of directors choosing where to maintain, increase, or reduce investment does. And their legal fiduciary duty is to maximize profits. That is the system's design right there.

[D-Coder]

"their legal fiduciary duty is to maximize profits" actually is not true. Although it's of course a very common motive.

[curried_haskell]

I would tone the statement down, but it's still true that the number one purpose of a for-profit business is to generate profit. All other activity, in general, is secondary to profit.

It's like saying a human doesn't need to eat. Sure, sometimes healthy people go without food to achieve a goal, and a few rare people sacrifice themselves for the common good. But these people are exceptions to the rule.

It might more profitable to find a cure, but often business is blinded by short term rather than the long game.

[tome]

I don't think that's true at all. In the UK at least I believe there is some expectation that a limited company will return profits to shareholders, but besides that the shareholders and directors can set the priorities of the company to be anything they want.

If you know of anything to the contrary I would be very interested to hear it!

[50CNT]

You could argue just as well that the number two purpose of an organization is to generate profit. Profit is a necessity to achieve your primary goals. People need to eat, but you'd have to be a pretty uninspired person if your number one purpose is meeting your caloric expenditures.

[karmajunkie]

I'm not sure what there is to tone down. The statement is patently untrue.[1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...

[huherto]

Not a conspiracy. It is just a matter of where the market incentives are.

[S_Daedalus]

It's just, "How business is done" and it's rarely if ever questioned.

[wahern]

> If your goal is to make money the optimal path is to manage symptoms but keep customers (i.e. patients) reliant on your treatments, ideally with their life depending on them.

I have no love for the pharmaceutical industry, but that logic is wrong for so many reasons.

1) Corporations on the public stock exchanges aren't constitutionally capable of maximizing profits with such long-term strategies. Stockholders want fat profits _now_, not a trickle of profits over decades. The industry is already high risk.

2) Because all the low-hanging fruit is gone, what big pharmaceuticals care about is stuffing their pipeline full of as many lottery tickets as possible. They don't have the luxury of only focusing on such narrow strategies as you describe; in order to hit the jackpot more often they need to play the field in all its dimensions. This shotgun approach is why we see so much less-than-revolutionary research. If companies only aimed for the stars (i.e. cures for high-profile diseases) all of them would quickly go bankrupt. They want scratch-offs in their pipeline, too, not only the Mega Millions.

3) For serious ailments the sick person isn't the consumer; the healthcare and insurance industries are the consumers. Substitutes are easier to find or develop for management/sustaining therapies, including none at all. And for such therapies, there's less pressure from the sick because such therapies are less high-profile. A possible cure? They'll be beating down their doctors' and insurers' doors.

4) As much as I hate patents, the effective patent life for a treatment is something like 15 years or less. Which means even if you could corner a market (and they sure do try), you only have 15 years maximum to dominate and reap huge profits, not a lifetime. Again, because it's easier to find alternatives and supplements to therapies like you describe, it's important to front-load as much profit as possible.

None of that is to say that there aren't pathological problems with the incentive structures driving the pharmaceutical and health therapy industries. Or that there aren't counter-veiling and counter-counter-veiling forces at play. But cynical, conspiratorial theories are really unhelpful. They're not realistic and ultimately rather fatalistic, I think.

[BurningFrog]

This would be a more credible argument if we hadn't cured so many diseases.

[greendestiny_re]

>We generally arent trying to cure diseases.

Exactly. Now consider that a vaccine is a medicine for a healthy person.