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posted by janrinok on Sunday April 15 2018, @06:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the enough-to-make-you-sick dept.

One-shot cures for diseases are not great for business—more specifically, they’re bad for longterm profits—Goldman Sachs analysts noted in an April 10 report for biotech clients, first reported by CNBC.

The investment banks’ report, titled “The Genome Revolution,” asks clients the touchy question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” The answer may be “no,” according to follow-up information provided.

[...] The potential to deliver “one shot cures” is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically engineered cell therapy, and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

[...] Ars reached out to Goldman Sachs, which confirmed the content of the report but declined to comment.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 15 2018, @05:15PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 15 2018, @05:15PM (#667315)

    Not just that, but in some parts of the world the traditional business model for healing people is that you pay when you feel well and stop paying until the medical provider has resolved the ailment. Which in many ways makes a lot more sense as there's less conflict of interest.

    Also, in most parts of the world, they don't focus on profit in the first place as it's pretty disgusting to draw all those lines about life based only on the bottom line.

    There is going to be a point where it's just too expensive to provide further treatments, but that kind of thing should be considered carefully. Any such evaluations should be based more on the quality and quantity of life that the patient would have later on. Trying to treat brain cancer in a 90 year old is probably not worthwhile, but not because the company doing the procedure can't get paid, but because it offers relatively little quality of life after the procedure.

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday April 15 2018, @08:42PM (2 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday April 15 2018, @08:42PM (#667383) Journal

    traditional business model for healing people is that you pay when you feel well

    Yes, and the witch doctors and shamans that practice there know that most people will heal themselves if left alone, (because that's what all animals do), and the rest can be blamed on evil spirits. So the cures and treatments don't actually have to work at all.

    This is why we have nephropathy and homeopathy and assorted other quack treatments.

    But hey, way to champion a rational medical system!

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @01:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @01:46PM (#667620)

      Ah, nice to see some "rational" bigotry going on here.

      The point is that they have a system where the money is aligned with the best interests of the patients to a much larger degree than in the US.

      Also, despite your arrogant chortles, the medical system in Europe and the US at the same time that those "witch doctors" were the main source of medicine was hardly any better. They'd have people taking all sorts of weird treatments with no particular evidence of efficacy, but they'd be making money directly off the cures that ranged from questionable to fraudulent to downright dangerous.

      Homeopathy is something that people like you like to trot out because it's an easy target for pot shots, the more typical treatments for things involve herbal remedies which remain the main source of pharmaceuticals in the current era. We've just recently gotten to the point where we can do things that don't require a plant to do it first. And yet, you make it sound like we're centuries further ahead of those practices than we are. Western medical science isn't as advanced as people like you would have us believe. We're still behaving like bacteria cause illness when there's scant evidence to support that version for most diseases. It's superstition that kills a lot of people.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:59AM (#667976)

      Yeah but it's funny how lots of companies interview those shamans and witch doctors to learn what herbs they use in order to find more stuff to patent.

      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mother-natures-medicine-c/ [scientificamerican.com]

      They often need to know more than just what herb:

      https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/medicines-in-nature/ [nationalgeographic.com]

      Gomes told me how, a year earlier, he had visited a healer in rural West Bengal whose plant successfully countered cobra and viper poison. The healer's recipe had come from his grandfather to his father to him.

      Gomes took the healer's plant to his laboratory to test on rats. He prepared a dosage of snake venom that he could predict would kill 50 percent of the animals. He administered it by injection, and 50 percent of the rats died. Next, he gave the same dosage to another group of rats, then fed them an extract of the roots. None of the rats died.

      Gomes returned for more of the plants, but the healer had grown suspicious and refused to provide any more.

      So Gomes had a botanist examine what remained of the first batch of plants. Together they went to rural West Bengal, collected the same plant, and again tried the experiment. The new plants did nothing to neutralize the venom. Just as Rasoanaivo had found in his work with anticancer medicines, the chemical composition of plants is complicated. Even with all their modern technology scientists do not know which plants to pick or when to pick them or whether traditional healers might have added other herbal or nonherbal ingredients to the cure.

      There's a very good argument for having standardized pills so you know exactly how much of the stuff you're taking and also for figuring out side effects, doses and interactions. But one should also realize that lots of those cures and treatments we have come from traditional knowledge.

      Lastly:

      Yes, and the witch doctors and shamans that practice there know that most people will heal themselves if left alone,

      In very many cases "modern medicine" doctors do a similar thing - they give patients antibiotics or placebos for milder cases of flu. And the patients heal themselves.

      Even for stuff like surgery and bone setting it's the body that has to do the final job of putting the pieces together. It doesn't always work (e.g. idiot patient smokes after reattachment surgery, diabetes etc).