Not infinity. Only the path to make steady returns in a few short years. Take disease research. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease. They would like to treat disease. That means recurring revenue. They would like to focus on the diseases with the most patients to maximize the market for their product. This is why a dozen plus pharma companies are pursuing glp1 while cutting internal r and d jobs and offshoring everything not specifically bolted to this country by the FDA to India.
This is what depressed me as an early career scientist. Money to do the work to advance our species is not being distributed. Only money to generate more money for a sliver of the ownership class is distributed.
The incentives are broken. We aren’t getting Star Trek in our future. We are getting CHOAM.
"Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease."
In practice, quite a lot of new drugs are curative. Gene therapy, for example, usually fixes the underlying problem once and for all. Even monoclonal antibodies are rarely of the type that needs to be used for the rest of your life.
If you succeed in putting someone's cancer into remission, that patient has to be monitored for the rest of their life, but they usually don't consume any expensive drugs anymore. The expenses are more on the necessary personnel side.
There is this unpleasant fact that most chronic diseases worsen in the last 2 decades of our lives, when our systems are already seriously dysregulated by aging. Hard to fix anything reliably in a house that is already halfway down.
How many gene therapies are approved vs treatments?
>Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease. They would like to treat disease
This is nonsense. Pharma are never in a position where they can choose between curing and treating. 90% of clinical trials fail. Pharma is throwing things at the wall and picking whatever sticks.
Then explain the herd mentality if they were truly all trying all posibilities. No, same old same old. Pharma is not removed from the usual incentives of capitalism. FWIW the line about treatments not cures is pretty much a direct quote from a product manager at a major pharma company I heard speak at an internal presentation. Straight from the horses mouth.
"Is curing patients a sustainable busines model?" - Goldman 2018
https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/goldman-sachs-asks-in-bi...
Many of the biggest medical innovations have come from publicly funded university researchers, which then license or give away their findings to private businesses.