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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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The "it's a conspiracy why we don't have a cancer cure" comments make me want to just lay down and drool on my carpet. It's so fucking retarded it just knocks the brain cells out of me.
There is a conspiracy on this. Pharma companies aren't interested in curing cancer because it would rob them of many millions of life long "customers" who are reliant on their products. The majority of their R&D budget goes into specific treatments of symptoms, or treatments focused on specific types of cancer rather than a fundamental cure. Universities and charities do the research into the cure but they're nowhere near as well funded. This is a pretty well-documented fact, sadly.
It's not exactly unbelievable either, given the behaviour of other corporations like Nestlé, Shell, BP etc.
Edit: Huh this turns out to be quite controversial. I remain unconvinced by your arguments. Just for the record, I'm not a conspiracist, but I do believe there are conspiracies, and I believe this is one of them. It's a mundane one, a lot like the conspiracy to keep everyone burning planet-killing fossil fuels or lung-destroying cigarettes.
It's been...Reddit, talking with you.
It's utter nonsense. R&D on treatment is generally a safer investment than a full cure that may not pan out at all.
But think of it like this: the first company that does cure cancer will easily out-compete other pharmaceutical companies. That's why we do in fact have cures for a variety of cancer types.
And it's not like people will stop getting cancer once a cure is found. You can keep selling the cure you can patent! That would push any other pharma company that only focuses on treatment out of the market immediately.
I really hope the first company to cure cancer does like Volvo did with the 3 point seatbelt & says "hey, this is really important-- everyone do this!"
Its more complicated than that. Cancer exists in everyone and has millions of variants. The question does it mastesize or is it benign? Where is it? Is it just some lump on your arm at 95? Or on your heart at 35? There are many factors.
The focus of research should be on telomere therapy, because that's the most likely area to develop an all-cure. Yet it receives a fraction of the budget other therapies receive. Most telomere research is funded by grants from charities or public funds. I couldn't find any research funded by private bodies (which isn't to say there is none).
Look, if people could get a jab that vaccinated them against cancer, the companies selling the current myriad treatments, often lifelong, would stand to lose a huge chunk of their income. I don't think that's in any way magical thinking. The next premise is that the divvying up of R&D funding will therefore never be in favour of an easy, outright cure, because the people who make those decisions aren't doctors or cancer patients, and their role is purely to increase the value of the company, over the short and long term. Yes, the first company to do it would destroy the profits of any competitors, but it would reduce its own in the process.
So we have: 1: a one-time vaccination or other easy therapy to prevent or cure cancer wouldn't be in the interests of any company making lots of money off a vast treatment range, and
2: the people who allocate funding aren't going to research the treatment in 1) out of the goodness of their hearts. The outcome is a much slower general progression towards a cancer cure than is ideal. It does amount to a conspiracy, but only because of the pressures of the free market. It's the same kind of mass stupidity the human race displays when it comes to climate change.
I'm honestly interested to see if you refute either of the two points above, or their link/outcome. I genuinely would love to be wrong about this.
Um... https://abcnews.go.com/Health/melanoma-cancer-vaccine-minimal-side-effects-nearing-phase/story?id=106521186
Also- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
Are you going to tell me Merck lost a huge chunk of their income when they developed Gardasil?
No, obviously not. What I'm saying is a universal cure for cancer would do that. I thought I'd made that clear, sorry.
That is not possible. Cancer is not one disease, it's an umbrella term for a huge range of diseases. What you're talking about is like a vaccine for all types of virus. Things don't work that way.
I mean thanks, but I don't think you've got that right. It's a runaway mutation. Stopping all runaway mutations is hypothetically possible.
Saying it's impossible is loser talk.
It is not "loser talk." It's just a fact. "Cancer" is about as broad a term as "virus." There are no panaceas. You can't cure "cancer" because it isn't actually one disease. It's lots of diseases. You don't have to take my word for it, listen to these losers-
https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2023/10/cancer-is-not-one-disease
"Stopping all runaway mutations is hypothetically possible"
Yeah and putting a dyson sphere around the sun is "hypothetically possible" but what you're suggesting is that we take into account every aspect and detail of a cell, every possible change it's "programmed" to do, account for it, then create a medicine that can target every single one of those possible changes regardless of the person and their unique parameters, and both revert them to "factory settings" while also not interrupting the ones that have no mutated changes.
Right now we have "bombs" to hit generalized areas and hope for the best, CRISPR is trying to act as more guided munitions and we've seen good progress, but a cure would be a 100% accurate bullet that inflicts no casualties and kills the target every time flawlessly, and that is such a scientifically advanced concept it sounds like magic.
A certain Arthur C Clarke quote springs to mind.
I feel like neither of us are really qualified to go that much further in the discussion. The sources I've read (reputable peer reviewed, or resumes of) tell me that the cure is hypothetically possible, there are things which link all cancers together, including telomere properties and behaviour. Improving our knowledge of these areas is critical when aiming for the cure. In a perfect world, there would be enough funding for this, and more scientists could choose that path. The fact that it's not a viable career because of financial concerns has been lamented to me by two researchers, in person. These are my friends and they're incredibly knowledgeable and I believe them. You don't have to, but you'll have to do better than this to convince me they're wrong.
By your own admission you're wrong. It's a theory. There is no proven evidence that suggests it's possible outside of the fact we have no evidence that suggests it's impossible. You might be right (some day) but right now you're wrong, there's nothing that says you could be correct, and your entire premise is based off the idea that some day in the distance future it could come to fruition which is the case for just about every single thing we've imagined but have yet to create. Convincing you that you're wrong is irrelevant, I'm trying to convince the one person besides us that reads this that you're wrong.
No! I've not admitted I'm wrong. I will be glad to if it turns out to be so.
The whole point of R&D is to discover and develop new things which weren't possible yesterday. Your argument seems to be that because we don't know how to do something right now, it's impossible. There are endless examples of people in history saying some technology we now take for granted was impossible.
Nope, while telomers and general aging are important. It has nothing or little to do with most diseases. You say the people making decision are not cancer patients. That is not really true. 20 % of the population die of cancer. 1/5 of the pharma management dies of cancer, 1/5 of the spouses of these people die of cancer. 1/5 of the children of these people die of cancer. It is in the direct egoistic interest of these people to find cancer cures.
Ok, so if the people making the decision were all patients or the relatives of patients, and they were also just regular people with normal working class jobs, do you think the amount of money put into research would increase or decrease?
I don't know, many societies don't want to discuss how much worth is one additional year of life for example. I also don't know if it would improve output if research and development and manufacturing of drugs would be completely state run. But the I think the ruling elites are almost all patients in one form or the other. Have you ever seen a completely healthy elderly politician? If it only taking pills against high blood pressure, or high cholesterol. Or maybe they have a new hip or knee joint.
Point 1 is easy: yes a single company might care more about treatment over prevention, but there exist more than one company. The first to develop the cure easily outcompetes all the others. And this is demonstrably true, since we have tons of vaccines for all kinds of illnesses. Ergo, it is in companies' best interest to develop cures, so they can remain competitive.
Point 2 is also a bit silly. Tons of medicinal research is done using donated funds. There are a lot of researchers working on cancer cures. But "cancer" is a very broad category of disease, there will never be a single cure. Instead we focus on cures and treatments of specific types of cancer, and we do find cures every now and then.
W.r.t. telomere research, it's certainly interesting but the link between telomeres and cancer/aging is all still fairly weak. There's not much evidence anything there actually works. That's also why funding in that area is lacking; more promising fields are being explored instead.
I think you're missing the point: any company making lots of money off cancer therapies will lose out after a cure behind available. That's point 1. Then point 2 is a point about how large corporations work, i.e. they will not do something against their own financial interests, even if it is in the interests of everyone, cf. weapons manufacturers and oil drillers.
If you accept these, then a possible outcome is that there's no corporate interest in curing cancer once and for all.
You're missing that in a free market, companies will try to compete with one another. Strictly focusing on treatment is far too risky an endevour if another company is working on a cure.
It's all risk-reward. A company with a cure is certain customers will come to them, as anyone would pick a cure over treatment. Additionally, they can ask for a high price: it's your only option to be cured after all! So therefore, a cure is low-risk high-reward. Exactly what investors like. It's also why there is a lot of research going into curing cancer, which disproves your hypothesis.
If company A does treatments but company B cures, then B stands to make a lot of money and A sees their revenue stream cut off overnight. This means that in order to remain competitive, A must also research a cure. It's in their financial interest, as it is the only guaranteed way to keep making money.
The reason we don't have an amazing cure for all cancers yet is because cancer is difficult to cure, not because there isn't any funding. We've already cured a couple types of cancer, but no one cancer is exactly the same.