From the article, "Animal trials of the protein are due to start this year, with any treatment using it likely to be some years away." Well, I'm glad that got mentioned. Most of the article looks like a minimal rewrite of a press release. It is way too early for this to be on the front page of HN as "news," as there is nothing but speculation here so far. Over the years, I have seen a lot of press releases about this or that "cure" appear on the front page of HN, but a few years later, it is discovered that there is neither safety nor effectiveness in actual human clinical use of the proposed cure. Let's check in on this again after there have been human clinical trials that have progressed to actual pre-marketing studies of the treatment.
Maybe instead of taking two years, it will take four, or eight. Would you be surprised if it took ten to sixteen?
But then again 64 years might be just about right. How long ago was it again when we were all supposed to be driving flying cars? I remember in 1992 reading about "holographic credit card-sized storage" cards that were heading to market in "just a couple of years".
Engineers, biologists, and others seeking funding often way underestimate how long things take.
I don't think anyone feels that gene therapy delivery mechanisms are going to be plug and play. Until we master the technology, I'm sure that each attempt at gene therapy will be specifically geared to solving a single genetic problem.
It's like in software development. Often introduction of new complexities doesn't create a linear amount of work to write and maintain it. Depending upon the coupling of the complexity, the extra effort could be multiplicative or exponential.
Seriously, how long have we been hearing about "cures for AIDS". A couple of decades? Now, this particular vapor cure has an extra dependency upon an unspecified gene therapy. It's naive to think that an actual cure based upon this research isn't much further away than the article hints at.
There isn't any reason anyone should spend much time listening to what I have to say about it, but I would expect gene therapy delivery to be increasingly plug and play. My reasoning being, the safety issues are concentrated around transmission so insertion strategies that have a robust story there will be copied. Especially if they are effective. Also, the 'obvious' gene therapy targets tend to be similar mechanisms (approximately because they are available at the level of understanding we have right now).
I don't actually expect this to be available as a treatment any time soon, but I think confident pessimism is probably at least as naive as confident optimism (simply because estimating what is possible is so hard).
this is never going to happen.... its too fucking profitable to have someone pulling 40,000 dollars of medications for 40 years, that is largely government subsidized vs. a one time 10,000 dollar fix. i mean yall realize how outstandingly different those two numbers are right? 40,000 * 40 = 1.6 million dollars in government subsidized money PER person... vs 10,000.... the former is literally 16 times more profitable... no way these industries back off that business model. ( i realize im just guessing at what a one time gene therapy fix would have to reasonably cost, but you could double it or triple it, quintuple it and its still significantly less profitable than the former. )
By that conspiracy theory logic, I'd expect that no pharmaceutical company has ever done a clinical trial on a gene therapy based cure for a disease. But in reality... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy
It's not. That's because gene therapy is really difficult. The fact that they're doing clinical trials at all does mean that they're spending a huge amount of resources on it, though, as it's not easy to get to that stage.
C'mon, his handle is "conspiracynutt". I think it's probably his job to swear that there's a drug company conspiracy that aims to prevent finding the cure for any disease that they can profit from instead.
Who is getting the 1.6 million vs the 10 thousand? If you could steal revenue from a rival it might be worth it. Also as the patents on your 40K a year income steam expire this 10K a head solution comes on line to double dip and make the generics worthless.
