[mquirion]

I almost never comment, but the answer here is simple: markets.

The common cold doesn't kill. There's almost no economic impetus for a cure. Note, I said "almost." There may be some, but there's still not enough to drive R&D in a corporate lab, and certainly not enough to drive policy in a government lab.

There are 100 other questions that would follow from science to logistic once you answer: Can we create a drug that kills infection in clinical tests?

[epmaybe]

Cold can kill, viral pneumonia is real as our current pandemic can attest to. There's certainly a market to cure all sorts of viral illness. Take tamiflu as an example. Most people if they get a flu will use it once a year to reduce symptoms. Imagine a drug that would reduce all symptoms of cold that you take every time you get cold symptoms. That's potentially billions of dollars in revenue each year.

[throwmeaway_pls]

NyQuil’s and Alka Seltzer’s sales figures beg to differ.

[mquirion]

NyQuil and Alka Seltzer would beg you not to kill the cash cows.

Plus NyQuil and AS can be produced and sold in such a way as to net a profit. We don't know that's the case for a cold cure.

[karlshea]

Those aren’t cures.

[lm28469]

You'll make much more money selling symptoms relievers every years than fixing the issue once and for all.

[grahamburger]

You'd make a lot more money selling a yearly treatment that prevented the symptoms entirely. I probably spend $50/year on cold-symptom medications. I'd easily spend $100/year to just not get a cold in the first place.

[Enginerrrd]

Those both work against symptoms caused by an enormous range of pathologies though.

Compare that to a specific drug targeting a small percentage of the causative agents of the common cold, for which the duration is short enough that by the time you'd get a reliable test back, you'd have gotten over your cold anyway.

There's just not much of a practical use for such a drug.

[throwmeaway_pls]

Sounds like that is the prevailing opinion amongst software engineers on HN. “If the product doesn’t exist, then the market doesn’t exist” isn’t how biology works. I assure you that many in life sciences would kill to get their hands on a successful therapeutic program in this area. There is a wide world of markets available.

[Enginerrrd]

I'm not a software engineer and I used to work in several sectors of healthcare (emergency medicine and family practice). The drug target against rhinovirus already exists and I was explaining why it's not yet on the market. A drug (with potential side effects or allergies) against maybe 10% of 200 some odd common cold viruses (which typically have very little impact) isn't that useful, and I don't know any physicians that would consider it acceptable practice to order and incur the expense of a test and then write a prescription to address an issue that will resolve itself in just a few days anyway.

That's not to say it might not be worth it for someone with COPD, lung disease or serious immunocompromise or something, but you seem to be lacking a pragmatic understanding of the situation described, yet you're readily criticizing me on the basis of an (incorrect) ad hominem argument.

Tamiflu is a much better example than Nyquil (which you offered up earlier) where it does make sense. But in that case, influenza typically lasts longer, it's more serious, it's much easier to diagnose, and the potential complications are much more severe and likely. It's probably more prevalent as well.

[throwmeaway_pls]

Sorry, I was summarizing several replies and wasn’t trying to make a personal attack against you. My hope was to point out that there are other ways of looking at things.

You seem to be coming at things in terms of patient trade-offs. I’m saying that AbbVie loves selling more Humira, and some sort of hypothetical magical anti-infective would’ve been a way to do so.

[fiftyfifty]

I would actually argue that it should be the government's role to push the development of vaccines and drugs for treating even harmless diseases. We spend trillions of dollars on national defense in the US, when you look at the economic damage and cost in lives that the Covid-19 outbreak has cost us, the threat of disease outbreaks is every bit as damaging as a military attack, maybe even worse. If we had taken the time to develop and take all the way through the approval process a vaccine to previously encountered Coronaviruses such as SARS or MERS we would probably already have a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 approved by the FDA and in distribution. Maybe we should be building a few less F-35s and instead be developing vaccines against otherwise harmless viruses, because you never know when a close relative of a harmless virus is going to turn into a deadly outbreak. In the US at least that seems like it should fall under the protective role of the federal government.

[jokethrowaway]

The economic damage is coming mainly from economical policies, namely lockdowns. The death rate has been quite low overall, even including the initial phase in which our incompetence in curing covid caused more deaths than it should have.

I agree the government wastes money on a lot of things (13bln per day!) and that's exactly why I'd rather have the market come up with what we should be spending our money on.

[newsbinator]

Surely there's a Nobel Prize in it though?