"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.
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.