this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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The hypothetical here is interesting in that it shows this commenter basically being a money maximiser. Say you're the inventor of this cure - you're the only one who understands it, basically it's magic. You have 2 choices:
or you can
But you see it’s your moral responsibility to earn to give™️. This means that in order to do good in the world you have to keep milking every last maximized penny out of your cancer cure. To save people. Altruism, y’see.
the problem is that trials are pretty expensive, we're talking something about billion dollars per compound range for the entire thing from phase 1 to market, and even then some 85%+ fail. (of course phase 1 failure is cheaper than phase 3 failure) at this point all IP is owned by bean counters backed by VCs or one of few mammoth biopharma gigacorporations
i understand that a lots of new drugs is developed this way: an sfba startup gets funded, does a thing, sucks VCs off for few tens of millions of dollars, tries to push something to phase 1 and then either doesn't that and collapses or does that, sells IP to someone bigger, and also collapses (because they fired biologists to hire compliance), or if they don't collapse, they repeat until they do, accumulating half-baked IP along the way
btw this is part of the reason why antibodies are such a big thing, small changes can keep these things patented basically indefinitely and at the same time these are hard enough to make that generics will be pretty hard to impossible. one sane solution would be to try some state-funded research in this area
Yeah I'm kinda familiar with the realities of drug development and testing, which is why I prefaced my comments with the solution being essentially magic. If we find hte magic bullet for cancer I expect it will be a slow grind and a lot of trial and error, so the wealth will be diluted across many entities. Not to mention the current business of cancer care might try hard to stop it...
in american context specifically, from what i understand, the biggest financial black hole are the intermediaries, all these motherfuckers whose job is to say that no, you won't get it paid out of insurance