We want cures. NIH should focus on cures not therapies

I have been thinking about NIH, Government grants and Drug companies. The money is in therapy not cures. A drug company prefers a therapy because the poor patient never gets cured and has to continue sometimes forever taking the stuff. Cures are much better for the patient but it is difficult to pay fairly for them. Antibiotics are a good example. They can cure you. If you have a microbial infection that would kill or severely debilitate you an antibiotic can cure you of this disease. You take the drug for a while and then stop taking it after you are cured. Being cured is worth a lot of money but we don’t pay for it. Antibiotics became cheap do to market pressures and there was little money in their production and sale. Therefore the pharmaceutical industry has little interest and the development of new antibiotics almost stopped. Then came organisms resistant to the antibiotic and it no longer worked. However, there were few in the pipeline so that the number of effective antibiotics available went down. If we had just paid proportionally to the value received then the pipeline would have been full and we could have more effectively addressed the resistance problem. It is easy to develop resistant organisms. In microbiology labs we did it all the time by growing billions of bacterial in the presence of the antibiotic and selecting the colonies that grew. They were composed of bacteria that were resistant to the antibiotic. Fortunately, such resistant bacteria usually give up something to become resistant and do not do as well competing with other bugs when the antibiotic is absent. This is why we don’t want to over use antibiotics. If we keep the antibiotic there then we will continually favor the resistant bugs.

NIH and other government agencies in the healthcare area should focus their research on cures. The drug companies don’t like cures but will readily develop therapies because that is where the money is. The drug companies will take care of the therapies but without NIH there will be little focus on cures.