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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 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).