That’s the lenient interpretation I’d hope.
But we’re not an alternative medicine group or anything. If you look into their shareholder meetings the public info seems to be that they judge whether investments are worth it by potential return on investment, and well a lifelong treatment is always going to be more profitable for them than a cure.
To be fair, and it’s still bullshit, we also look at number of patients per week per cost. Crispr for example, could be used for a huge variety of issues, but curing 100 people globally for $100M in clinical development is just not going to work.
Crispr is the exception:
- it’s massively expensive
- it can cure multiple illnesses and perform loads of other functions
Most proposals for cures are a fairly simple (and cheap) therapeutic target that will only work for one condition or even just a subset of cases within that condition.