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Goldman Sachs asks in biotech Report: Is curing patients a sustainable business? (2018)

(www.cnbc.com)
249 points randycupertino | 2 comments | 16 Nov 25 23:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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stego-tech ◴[17 Nov 25 00:03 UTC] No.45949690[source]▶
I feel kinda bad for the writer, because it's a good question: no, curing patients is not a good business model, just like public transit is not a good business model.

What a lot of folks neglect are N+1-order effects, because those are harder to quantify and fail to reach the predetermined decision some executive or board or shareholder has already made. Is curing patients a bad business model? Sure, for the biotech company it is, but those cured patients are far more likely to go on living longer, healthier lives, and in turn contribute additional value to society - which will impact others in ways that may also create additional value. That doesn't even get into the jobs and value created through the R&D process, testing, manufacturing, logistics of delivery, ongoing monitoring, etc. As long as the value created is more than the cost of the treatment, then it's a net-gain for the economy even if it's a net loss for that singular business.

If all you're judging is the first-order impacts on a single business, you're missing the forest for the trees.

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tptacek ◴[17 Nov 25 01:50 UTC] No.45950199[source]▶
Saying that curing diseases is a bad business model is like saying discovering the world's largest gold mine would be a bad business because you'd eventually run out of gold. The underlying argument doesn't make sense.
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ninetyninenine[dead post] ◴[17 Nov 25 05:24 UTC] No.45951046[source]▶
[flagged]
mike_hearn ◴[17 Nov 25 16:46 UTC] No.45955329{3}[source]▶
> Do. the. math. and. think.

OK then, where's your math?

tptacek is right, this whole discussion is silly because it revolves around what exactly "bad" means which is subjective. But if you want to really do calculations about this, you'd need to price out total expected revenue over your time preference window for each scenario. It's not at all obvious which one would win because it depends on at least these variables and probably more:

1. Over what time period you care about. "You" here means a hypothetical pharma executive who cares about his/her incentives. If symptom management makes a billion dollars repeatedly but each billion takes 200 years, and a cure makes a billion dollars once but in five years, nobody rational will want to sell symptom management.

2. Related to (1) what expected market returns are in future.

3. What price premium you can charge for a cure vs symptom management. The former is more valuable to customers.

4. How fast competitors can catch up. Imagine you find both symptom management and a cure for disease X. You keep the cure a secret and bring the subscription to market (for a price much less than what a cure would command). Six months later a competitor releases a cure, simultaneously wiping out your market and capturing all the immediate revenue. That would have been a bad move.

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ninetyninenine[dead post] ◴[17 Nov 25 20:34 UTC] No.45957973{4}[source]▶
[flagged]
tptacek ◴[17 Nov 25 20:52 UTC] No.45958138{5}[source]▶
Can you not paste LLM output here? Thanks.
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ninetyninenine ◴[17 Nov 25 22:22 UTC] No.45959064{6}[source]▶
It’s not. Can you not go around making up fucking shit and baselessly accusing people of posting LLM output? Thanks.
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1. tptacek ◴[17 Nov 25 22:30 UTC] No.45959144{7}[source]▶
It very obviously is. You went from using normal-person quotation marks to fitted quotes in the span of one message, you have a Unicode multiplication dot, and things like

    Again, this is not “subjective.” It’s what actually happens

    This isn’t a subjective opinion. It’s just how discounted cashflow works.

    You can argue about the ethics if you want. But the financial comparison isn’t ambiguous.
Your paste doesn't even use a normal keyboard minus sign:

    |nue) ... cost. S|
Another tell is how much of the quote isn't responsive to the whole thread context, just Hearn's immediate message. I'll add that it doesn't even manage to rebut Hearn!

(Feel free to compare this to your own writing style to get some clarity for what to fix up next time before pasting LLM output).

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Later

In case you were typing while I updated this, the first version of this comment didn't notice your minus sign, but it stuck out to me and when I checked it was so funny you used an en-dash I couldn't not include it.

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2. ◴[21 Nov 25 00:35 UTC] No.45999868[source]▶