>If it wasn't, why has it taken this long for someone to take ownership of that huge pile of risk-free money
Maybe because no one thought of it before?
The picture you're painting is fine if you're evaluating a handful of candidate molecules each with, you'd guess, a 5% chance of having the right PK profile or something.
But for major breakthroughs, there are "unknown unknowns" that make it impossible to estimate that likelihood. It's nice to think that, if you let the full value be captured, it would incentivize more people to pursue one-in-a-million "lottery ticket" cures, but it just doesn't work that way. They're not lottery tickets if they have incalculable odds.
For the most part, the difference between management and cures is in this latter category. I.e. we don't have a cure because we just don't know how to do it, not because we were too cheap to invest in the biochemical trench warfare to find the right molecule.
Maybe because no one thought of it before?
The picture you're painting is fine if you're evaluating a handful of candidate molecules each with, you'd guess, a 5% chance of having the right PK profile or something.
But for major breakthroughs, there are "unknown unknowns" that make it impossible to estimate that likelihood. It's nice to think that, if you let the full value be captured, it would incentivize more people to pursue one-in-a-million "lottery ticket" cures, but it just doesn't work that way. They're not lottery tickets if they have incalculable odds.
For the most part, the difference between management and cures is in this latter category. I.e. we don't have a cure because we just don't know how to do it, not because we were too cheap to invest in the biochemical trench warfare to find the right molecule.