Reddit reviews The Antidote: Inside the World of New Pharma

Once one actually understands the process by which therapies are developed this claim is totally absurd. The pharmaceutical industry is fiercely competitive.

The vast majority of drugs fail to be approved due to side effects, or lack of therapeutic effect so the thought that a company would reject a promising new drug is absurd. Also limits on patent and licencing time strongly encourage companies to continually develop new therapies even ones that would replace their current product.

The other thing as I mentioned before is that people actually make a lot of money curing disease. Here is an article from scientific American about hepatitis C cures and the economics of them. The jist of the Hep C story is companies stand to make a fortune off curing the disease (Granted they had a spend a fortune to develop them in the first place).

If you really want to learn more about the pharmaceutical industry check out The Antidote its a pretty good read about Vertex one of the companies who developed one of the drugs used to cure hep c.

The reality is developing a cure for a disease is very hard, and often we simply don't have the tools required to do it. The pharmaceutical industry has been slow to develop new tools instead over relying on small molecule drugs. This is all changing though with many companies pushing curative new biologic therapies through the pipeline. Take a look at Juno, Avalanche, Spark, or one of the many many other companies working on developing complete 1 time cures for disease, the economics are there, it's the science that's the hard part.