Outside of basic research there is little to be done. We don’t have a good animal model, and human testing on a disease that takes 30+ years is almost hopeless without a much better understanding of what’s going on.
I'm not exactly sure what your point is? You're trying to tell me how hard the problem is? I never said the problem was easy, never offered a solution, or claimed there's a clear path to a solution.
Alzheimer's is an underfunded disease given the amount that it costs us in healthcare. I'm saying we should spend a lot more money and put someone in charge of the money who will spend it effectively.
Saying it’s underfunded makes assumptions around how likely we are to find a solution. If hypothetically spending 1 trillion dollars gives us a 1 in 1 Billion chance of finding a cure then that’s simply not worth it.
Further spending more money does not give linear increases in value. Bumping up from around 2 bullion a year sounds great from a budget standpoint, but do we have another 8 Billion dollars worth of promising research to do next year and people able to carry that out? We are already ramping up funding rapidly, but there are only so many specialists out there.
We don't need a cure for the investment to pay off. If we can simply slow the disease, we'll save a fortune. If the disease takes an additional decade, that's a lot of healthcare costs. You might even die from something else before it gets worse.
I never claimed that if we doubled the money, we'd get double the research. I simply threw out a SMALL number like $10 billion a year. We spend $28 billion on HIV, for example.
HIV has a well known cause which makes research more productive. Faster than light communication would be really useful, but we have no idea who to research it or if it’s even possible. Alzheimer’s research is not quite that bad, but we have already spent 10’s of billions and still have no real clue what’s going on let alone a possible way to treat it.
PS: People talk about the huge improvement in AIDS treatments, but by default people where often living 15+ years after infection. Note infection not detection. Extending that was always considered a viable approach.
You hope that’s true, but as I previously said you can’t replace exercise with a drug because of physics. So, it may in fact be a hard physical limitation that prevents drugs from working in this case.
I am not arguing it’s likely, only a very real possibility. Because in the end biology is physics, and therefore must deal with it.
