> The incentive isn't to cure but to treat. The Market wants (repeat) customers.
I am fed up with this argument.
Compared to a recurring treatment, a cure will:
- destroy the competing recurring treatment
- sell particularly well initially, when you still have the patent, potentially at a high price
- not stop the influx of repeat customers, since as long as people are alive, they will need medicine, and people who are now healthy because you cured them will be more likely to have a well paying job that will pay for expensive drugs
If that argument was true, no one would do vaccines, especially considering that most vaccines are not particularly expensive.
> Yee, though, says Gilead isn't filling a hole left from its declining HCV unit. It's merely coming down off a "massive bolus of hundreds of thousands of people who came in during the first two years."
> "The drug is still set to do $8 billion in 2017 and is one of the largest drugs in the world. Not exactly a hole," he said.
The Gilead stock is worth 4x today what it was worth in 2012, before they had the cure. It is better than the average "big-pharma" (ex: Pfizer). The stock plateaued because they couldn't follow up, but before you look at the dip, you should look at the massive raise before it.
Wall Street dinged them because Gilead is a one trick pony and the street overestimated revenue, not because Gilead cured HCV rather than just treating it.
Additionally, if their drug didn’t work as well they wouldn’t have gotten away with charging 100k for a course and wouldn’t have made 40B+ in revenue.
Agree. I can speak for oncology where the desire is always curative intent treatments. Unfortunately it’s often not possible so we settle for palliative therapy (presumably what GP meant by recurring).
Personally/professionally I think this argument comes from non-experts failing to understand the disease process and therapeutic challenges. I’ve seen no evidence or suggestion in my years of clinical practice that this assertion has a shred of truth behind it.
> If that argument was true, no one would do vaccines, especially considering that most vaccines are not particularly expensive.
While I agree with you this statement does not prove your argument. Vaccines aren’t a good example of funding for curative intent treatments.
The economics behind vaccinations are different as you vaccinate orders of magnitude more patients than would ever get the disease so even if the nefarious assumption is valid the economics may still favor this path.
This example is poorly chosen for a different reason explained in my comment.
Alternatively, we can look at novel curative intent therapies for cancer like focal ablation or stereotactic radiation.
The recurring customer alternative of chemo/immunotherapy or the conventional surgical option are at least an order of magnitude more expensive.
You won’t find much novel systemic therapy that’s curative intent because it’s really hard (?impossible) to do, not because the system wants to make more money slowly killing patients.
I am fed up with this argument.
Compared to a recurring treatment, a cure will:
- destroy the competing recurring treatment
- sell particularly well initially, when you still have the patent, potentially at a high price
- not stop the influx of repeat customers, since as long as people are alive, they will need medicine, and people who are now healthy because you cured them will be more likely to have a well paying job that will pay for expensive drugs
If that argument was true, no one would do vaccines, especially considering that most vaccines are not particularly expensive.