We get threads about this on HN a couple times a year, and I feel like people have never thought this through. The company that cures T1D or MS will make approximately eleventy jillion dollars. The mustache-twirlers engineering MS into a chronic manageable disease rather than curing it would simply be outcompeted and put out of business by the straight-mustached cure owners. If you believe the mustache-twirlers are capable of suppressing knowledge of a viable cure, I'm going to have fun selling you on a lot of more-plausible conspiracy theories; for instance, the faked moon landing, which would have required less collusion and been less impactful to the world.

In a strict sense, curing a single disease isn't a long term "sustainable business", because you'll eventually push the population of affected patients below a threshold of profitability. The premise of a major pharma company is that they keep finding other treatments.

You don't have to suppress a cure, you can just choose not to release information that reveal one or spend research money in directions that lead to a cure.

Also, not that vast if you consider the amount of people who have the information needed to realize what is going on.

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 drug the patent is legally invalid.

So it seems you’re the one not making sense.