Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 188 posts

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

#161

Post by ninetyninenine »

tptacek wrote: post #160
ninetyninenine wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it happened in dozens of labs… how the fuck does big pharma hold patents on certain drugs? The existence of a patent means the drug was developed and patented by one entity. If a molecule, synthesis path, or mechanism has already been disclosed in the literature by multiple labs, then that is public prior art and it cannot be patented. Therefore, If there were dozens of other researchers coming up with the same dr…

I'm not sure you understand how patents work.

[flagged]

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

#163

Post by xboxnolifes »

socalgal2 wrote: post #74
stego-tech wrote: post #22

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…

> ~public~ transit is not a good business model. ~public~ transit can be a good business model if it's setup correctly. The majority of Japan's 100 train companies are setup such that they own both trains and complementary interests. Office buildings, shopping centers, super markets, apartments. The better their trains are the better their other businesses do by delivering people to them. The better their other busin…

You're both kind of arguing the same thing. If the transit companies also own the places the people are traveling to, they are capturing the value of second order effects.

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

#164

Post by snowwrestler »

randerson wrote: post #150
snowwrestler wrote: post #7

It doesn’t matter if it is a sustainable business. People will do what they can to maximize their income now. If 10 companies are withholding a cure to milk the patients, any one of them can break from that strategy at any time, with near-instant financial reward and competitive advantage. It is not a stable equilibrium.

Not if one of those companies patents the cure.

Patents are intended to temporarily restrict competition. In order to get that, the inventor has to publish the invention.

The time limit creates incentive to go to market. Let’s say a company invents and patents a cure for cancer. If they just sit on it, they’ll get zero revenue, zero return on the cost to discover it… and then in 20 years their competitors can all use it for free. Not a sustainable business model—intentionally.

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

#165

Post by thrance »

stego-tech wrote: post #22

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…

I think this is a bad argument for socialized healthcare (Which I am 100% for BTW).

Look at retired people, they contribute very little to society. From a purely economical POV, letting them die is the correct course of action. I, and many others, find this morally abhorrent. We should provide healhcare because it is the correct thing to do, not because it is economically viable. The whole point of a society is for its members to live better lives collectively than they would individually, not to maximize some abstract value.

So, determine democratically how much resources we should pool into healthcare and distribute that fairly among ourselves, on an as-needed basis. That's how it works in much of the 1st world, and it works reasonably well. Better than in America, that's for sure, as can be seen by the higher life expectancies and cheaper medicine overall.

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

#166

Post by thrance »

idontwantthis wrote: post #10
snowwrestler wrote: post #7

It doesn’t matter if it is a sustainable business. People will do what they can to maximize their income now. If 10 companies are withholding a cure to milk the patients, any one of them can break from that strategy at any time, with near-instant financial reward and competitive advantage. It is not a stable equilibrium.

As long as government regulation prevents them from forming a cartel.

And as long as those cartels aren't powerful enough to buy the government into submission.

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

#168

Post by mike_hearn »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #133
tptacek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

> 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.

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

#170

Post by tptacek »

chickenbig wrote: post #132
agumonkey wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there ethical committees to avoid that? Health is not a normal business. Goldman Sachs modus operandi is leaning too far on the parasitic side of the spectrum

In July 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi invoked an indelible image when he described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” https://jasonzweig.com/wall-street-and-the-vampire-squid-a-b...

It would have been nice if Taibbi's understanding of the subjects he wrote about was as vivid as his writing used to be.
Post reply on HN