[_ihaque]

If this (or, more accurately, a drug developed downstream of this technology) worked, they absolutely would.

A great example of this in relatively recent history is the treatment of hepatitis C. The treatments pre-circa-2011 were pretty crappy: interferon/ribavirin had poor cure rates and bad side effects. But it was still better than hepatitis destroying your liver, so people dealt with it.

Then, in 2011, as the culmination of years of trials, telaprevir (from Vertex/J&J) [1] and boceprevir (Schering-Plough/Merck) [2] were approved and were DRAMATICALLY BETTER than interferon/ribavirin.

...and then just two years later both of these drugs got nuked by the approval of sofosbuvir (aka Sovaldi, from Pharmasset/Gilead) [3], which has _cure_ rates in excess of 90%. Telaprevir and boceprevir were pulled from the market because there was simply no more market for them once sofosbuvir hit. Scientific competition at its finest.

There is absolutely a dark side to pharmaceutical pricing and licensing, but please don't let the existence of that dark side cloud your vision of the transformative impact that those of us in biotech R&D want to have (and in many cases, have had). I was at Vertex when the early trial data on telaprevir started coming out and it became clear that we might be able to offer patients real hope who did not have it before.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telaprevir [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boceprevir [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofosbuvir

[brokensegue]

I respect the effort you put into this. Sadly I don't think people with this mindset are convinced by this kind of evidence