Has The Promise Of A Cure Proven To Be Impractical?
Focusing on a cure is sleight of hand for profit.
As I was perusing my Twitter feed the other day, I came across this meme of a man in the crowd reacting with astonishment to President Trump saying “The things we’re doing in our country today, there’s never been anything like it. We will be ending the AIDS epidemic shortly in America, and curing childhood cancer very shortly.”
The reaction of that man was spot-on. This is simply the latest and more grotesque version of a lie with a decade's long history of perpetrating grift on the American people. Politicians and big pharma keep us on the hook with the promise of a cure for this and that disease all while reaching a hand in our pockets. When was the last time we cured anything?
The truth
Goldman Sachs analyst Salveen Richter reportedly laid out the truth in a note to clients; “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.” Richter concluded with “While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine…
