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by kjkjadksj
127 days ago
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Not infinity. Only the path to make steady returns in a few short years. Take disease research. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease. They would like to treat disease. That means recurring revenue. They would like to focus on the diseases with the most patients to maximize the market for their product. This is why a dozen plus pharma companies are pursuing glp1 while cutting internal r and d jobs and offshoring everything not specifically bolted to this country by the FDA to India. This is what depressed me as an early career scientist. Money to do the work to advance our species is not being distributed. Only money to generate more money for a sliver of the ownership class is distributed. The incentives are broken. We aren’t getting Star Trek in our future. We are getting CHOAM. |
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In practice, quite a lot of new drugs are curative. Gene therapy, for example, usually fixes the underlying problem once and for all. Even monoclonal antibodies are rarely of the type that needs to be used for the rest of your life.
If you succeed in putting someone's cancer into remission, that patient has to be monitored for the rest of their life, but they usually don't consume any expensive drugs anymore. The expenses are more on the necessary personnel side.
There is this unpleasant fact that most chronic diseases worsen in the last 2 decades of our lives, when our systems are already seriously dysregulated by aging. Hard to fix anything reliably in a house that is already halfway down.