[colordrops]

This antiviral is extremely promising, and it boggles the mind how this has not gotten real funding. My cynical side thinks it would cut very deep into a lot of profits for all the various viral medications for lifetime diseases such as the HIV cocktail, herpes meds, and other viral illnesses, so there isn't much upside for a large company to fund this.

[shoyer]

Companies like Gilead have made a fortune on anti-viral cures. Case in point: their recent Hepatitis C vaccines, which pulled in $4B in one quarter last year [1]. So a lack of money to be made on cures is not why this isn't funded.

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2016/04/28/gilead-hepatitis-c-reven...

[devoply]

That theory would work except that if that were the case they would've bought him out and shut it down. Everyone wants to make money, as it stands someone will and they can be from any sort of background. Why hasn't a silicon valley head given this guy a few million though is beyond me.

[WalterBright]

In the 1970s the conspiracy theorists were all convinced that oil companies bought the patents to 100 mpg carburetors in order to keep them off the market. My father (ex military) laughed at the idea, as a huge problem for the military is fuel consumption, and they would not let a little old thing like patent rights stand in the way of using it.

[dvtv75]

It wasn't just the 70s, my father's picked up on it from all the conspiracy theory YouTube channels and rants on about it today. That, and the Zero Point Energy system that was developed and bought, then hidden away by the oil companies. No physicist can convince him that this is wrong, because "The designer found a way to do it."

Like making a spoken word version of a rap song...

[devoply]

Yeah that's true too it's difficult to stop technology once it's been discovered, someone will make use of it. Genie out of the bottle so to say.

[smitherfield]

Of course there's upside — if it really does cure all viral diseases it could be a trillion-dollar pill. Not to mention they'd want to introduce it before the competition.

What's probably working against it is it sounds too good to be true.