Chinese scientists achieve diabetes cure through innovative cell therapy, detailed in Cell Discovery. Patient, treated in July 2021, no longer requires insulin after eleven weeks, and is now medication-free for 33 months. The breakthrough, praised by Timothy Kieffer, signifies a major advancement in diabetes treatment. This novel approach utilizes the body's regenerative abilities and could alleviate China's healthcare burden. Further studies are needed for validation.
But why wouldn’t a rival company just start up and sell the cures? Not all pharma companies sell insulin.
Because then the rival company would also go out of business. The pharma industry is not about absolute cure but about continuously selling things - like all industries do. Medicine that cures you entirely and is not needed afterwards forever again is nothing the pharma industry wants.
Exactly, that’s why we’ll never have a vaccine for something like polio, it’s too profitable to make and sell iron lungs.
We have a vaccine. Not a cure.
You joke, but that’s actually a really interesting story. Jonas Salk, the developer of the first polio vaccine was adamantly against even patenting it and claimed that it ‘belonged to the people’. There is some potential controversy there, but we mostly just think he was a pretty great dude. Dude’s a fucking hero regardless.
I get the analogy you’re trying to make, but maybe want to switch to something else.
Like any other vaccine?
Yeah, legitimately could choose just about anything else besides polio and it would have landed pretty well.
I don’t really see how that goes against it. If anything it shows that some people will totally disregard profit in favor of bettering humanity. See also: the patent for insulin.
The bar to entry in the pharma market is extremely high. You need a lot of capital to enter it, which quickly disqualifies 95% of the population.
Now of course, people without money can still get funding from investors. But those investors are already racking big profits from the continuous model of insulin treatments. A cure would be a detriment to their profits, so it’s not something they’re interested in funding. Not all pharma is insulin, but it’s one of the bigger pharma industries.
This isn’t to mention that if you were one of the 5% and managed to have the resources to find and produce a cure, that the other mega corporations (with more funds than most of those 5% individuals) wouldn’t engage in anti competitive practices to shut you down. Many companies had good products but still ultimately failed.
Unfortunately capitalism does not allow innovation to flourish like many of us were taught to believe.