“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Goldman Sachs analysts ask

“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Goldman Sachs analysts ask

This is on the path to cyberpunk territory where the evil pharma company spreads a disease it created to sell a cure that needs to be taken regularly so they can keep their profits up. "For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year. “[Gilead]’s rapid rise and fall of its hepatitis C franchise highlights one of the dynamics of an effective drug that permanently cures a disease, resulting in a gradual exhaustion of the prevalent pool of patients,” the analysts wrote. The report noted that diseases such as common cancers—where the “incident pool remains stable”—are less risky for business."