[mattmanser]

People upvoting this are dreamers as that industry costs a phenomenal amount of money to put something through trials.

Millions is a trivial amount on what you could throw down the drain and end up with no actual product. It's not vulnerable to a startup as a startup can't practically enter that market. You'd need to be producing something else first.

And small? Not gonna cut it.

Something that works on mice and even something that looks in the lab to cure the disease often doesn't work in trials and doesn't beat the placebo effect.

[rsheridan6]

There are lots of pharmaceutical startups.

And, yeah, drug development is high risk. In other news, the sky is still blue.

Type 1 diabetes is still a pretty big market even if you had a one shot cure. There are hundreds of thousands of type 1 diabetics. If they pay a thousand dollars each (a steal at that price), that's hundreds of millions of dollars. For comparison, there are a few thousand people with CML, but that didn't stop Gleevec from being developed for it (it's very expensive).

[dpik]

A steal at a thousand dollars ? I have Type 1 and would consider an actual cure a great deal even if it cost everything I own plus my entire earnings for 10 years.

[yummyfajitas]

You might feel that way, but lots of politicians and commentators would decry that as "evil, greedy drug companies making a profit off sick people".

[rsheridan6]

I'm in the wrong business.

[mattmanser]

Find a cure for old age. Millionaires would give you virtually anything.

[Vivtek]

I think you mean a "maintenance regimen". Cures are for suckers.

[detst]

I believe the story of Lipitor involved Pfizer not being interested, followed by the creation of a startup around it's further development with the company eventually being bought by Pfizer. It then became the top-selling branded pharmaceutical in the world [1]. I guess the world just needs more dreamers like these people.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atorvastatin (yes, a wikipedia reference)