It was more of "If I would have to make sure there will be a steady revenue stream in the future, I would also try to achieve a limited time protection effect".

What's good about open markets is that if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his/hers. This gives you an incentive to create such product yourself.

Nah. Talk to the other producer(s) in secret and make a gentleman's agreement not to create a permanent cure. The regulations surrounding pharmaceuticals is enough to prevent other companies from entering the market. Illegal as shit but crimes have happened before.

Ugh, those dumb "withholding the cure" conspiratorial tropes. Have you looked at infamous asset striping companies and corporate raiders? Or even the short-termism of most companies? They don't think beyond optimizing next quarter share price and this is the default the business model of a publicly traded company which bucks the trend is noted when describing a company and not the other way around. That is a 0-bit compression case.

There is thus absolutely no shortage of people who are willing to burn perfectly profitable companies for big enough short term gain. In this case they would wind up eating an entire submarket. I think orders of magnitude more qualifies as a temptation.

The situation is also inherently a prisoner's dilemma - pharmaceutical companies know that they are not special and that anything they let sit quietly buried may be discovered by another company who may benefit from the short term cash.

This is before getting into how immensely valueable the "ashes" are for any company who goes the cure route successfully. They have a reputational premium and have a collective team whose appraised value has risen. Given the choice between your average team of X years of experience and a disease curing team with X years of experience guess which one would appraise higher in share prices by a considerable margin?

What's the solution? Maybe more gov investment? The chinese surely have that part covered.

there is no simple solution which can be summed up for a ycombinator comment.

that doesn't mean that the issue isn't real or isn't happening, because capitalism very much incites this kind of behaviour. That doesn't mean that abandoning capitalism is the right approach either, because that also solved other issues that would come back without it. Its just not an easy situation, but its nonetheless a reality that we have to admit that this kind of behaviour is highly rewarded with our current system and expect corporations to do whatever they can get away with, because most of the people that reach the highest position are amoral, simply because you cannot get to this kind of position without having that character trait

The problem is usually not one of legality but of optimization, so it's hard to "fix" without using a heavy hand. You can't force companies to invest in cures rather than treatment, especially at the cost of profit. And many individual parties will reach the same conclusion independently, with no need for collusion [0]. In this case it's not hard to arrive at the conclusion that:

> While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

> the success of [the cure] has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...

There is no simple solution is because Capitalism without regulation is tyranny. Regulations are good things, and if regulators need regulation that is far better than the tyranny that would arise without regulation, or enforcement of regulations. Similar to the cherry picking of enforcement, and regulation capture all too prevalent now.

Checks and balances are rational, while no checks and balances is insane and a recipe for mass corruption. This down vote demonstrates the success propaganda.

Transparency, or a bigger push towards crowd science platforms for open source drugs. Basically people who have in interest in medicines because it’s their passion work together like how the open source community works together. And then people like us find those projects. Idk health is not something we should pick and choose who gets what, that is causing a ton of unease under the surface that is bubbling up. You can only gas something so much before the amount of gas build up faster than released. But hopefully we start by making it illegal for politicians to own stock while in office.

> health is not something we should pick and choose who gets what

It's not possible for everyone to get the best of everything. After all, markets are about distributing scarce resources, not abundant ones.

well there is innovation, what was scarce years ago became less scarce through creative thinking, we have not arrived at the end of a thought yet, things evolve and what we call scarce today is not even a tip of the resources the future will see. the more minds we have working on something the more we realize of previous definition of scarcity was just in thought and not in product

  > if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his

That's what patents are (abused) for.

  > if someone else finds a permanent protection, then people will stop using your product and start using his

Whoever creates the permanent solution is likely to maximise profits, charging a premium which people may begrudgingly pay to not have the inconvenience of renewing their protection.

I expect there would be a balance point for those who can afford and those who cannot.

In practice everyone will collude to have chronic treatments and do bullshit clinical trials that prove non inferiority. And regulators are asleep at the wheel.

Prescription drugs are not an open market.

At the less extreme end, you have FDA authority to approve a product. At the more extreme end, you have the entire corporate media establishment lined up against you and doctors threatened with disbarment for prescribing (or even just advising) off-label.

Incorrect.

No need to pretend not to know that it's possible for a researcher to do their honest best and arrive at a subscription service palliative, and at the same time for the c-suite to think "nice".

> This statement seems to assume that a limited duration of protection is a given. We don't know that.

you can be sure they will design it like that or select the right versions that have such properties. Thats what you end up with MBAs leading businesses everywhere.