It would still require that the company that develops the cure could make more profit off it than it would make with chronic treatments.
So if you went purely for profit, you could only develop a cure if:
- you could price it higher than the price of the chronic therapy over the full lifetime of a patient.
or
- you could sell it to more patients than you could have sold the chronic treatment. A lot more, because every patient will only buy the cure once.
So even then the incentives would probably lead do driving the price of drugs up significantly. You'd also still have no incentive to actually eradicate a disease.
- you control only a fraction of the ongoing-treatment market, and the windfall you could get as a monopolist in the short-lived cure market is worth losing out on that steady cash flow
On the one hand you have a company who's business model depends on milking patients on chronic treatments. On the other hand you have a company that is able to develop a permanent cures for that disease. Guess which company is a threat to which company (hint: if there are no longer sick patients to milk you no longer have a business model).
Drug development is really hard - the odds are stacked against you.
Any successful drug with half a business case will be launched - no company can afford to be picky about cure vs. chronic treatment - there just aren't that many successful drug discoveries to enable it.
It would still require that the company that develops the cure could make more profit off it than it would make with chronic treatments.
No it doesn't. Why? Because there are multiple companies.
If company X is making $10B per year on a poor treatment, there is still an incentive for another company to create a cure, even if it only makes them $1B.
So if you went purely for profit, you could only develop a cure if:
- you could price it higher than the price of the chronic therapy over the full lifetime of a patient.
or
- you could sell it to more patients than you could have sold the chronic treatment. A lot more, because every patient will only buy the cure once.
So even then the incentives would probably lead do driving the price of drugs up significantly. You'd also still have no incentive to actually eradicate a disease.