You asked “where’s your math” and then somehow produced a reply with zero math in it. Not even a crude expected-value calculation. Just variables floating in space. So let me show you what the actual math looks like and why your argument falls apart the moment numbers enter the room.

You brought up time preference. Fine. The real comparison isn’t “200 years vs 5 years” because nobody is modeling revenue over two centuries. The real comparison is that chronic therapies have stable, recurring revenue over a long period while a cure gives you one spike and then destroys your own future customer base. If a chronic therapy earns $6,000 a year per patient for, say, 30 years, that’s $180,000 of lifetime revenue per patient before discounting. A realistic cure might command around $60,000 once. Even before discounting, the chronic model is triple the revenue. When you discount future cashflows, chronic still wins because its revenue stream is stable, protected, and repeatable. That’s the math. No handwaving required.

Expected market returns don’t mysteriously rescue cures. They’re already baked into NPV calculations. Chronic therapies have lower revenue volatility, lower development risk, more predictable reimbursement, and better protection from substitutes. The discount rate is effectively lower because the cashflow is more reliable. That’s why any competent finance team values the chronic model more highly. This isn’t a subjective opinion. It’s just how discounted cashflow works.

Your “price premium” angle also collapses once you actually compare markets rather than per-unit price. Yes, a cure could theoretically be priced higher than a monthly pill. But cures annihilate their own future market. Chronic therapies don’t. Charging $100k once is meaningless if the market you just wiped out used to pay $6k per year for decades. Chronic revenue behaves like a long linear stream. Cure revenue behaves like a front-loaded exponential decay curve. That decay is unavoidable because your successful product eliminates the future need for itself.

Your competition scenario reverses reality. If a competitor can release a cure six months after you, then your own cure had no durable pricing power anyway. Fast follow-on competition obliterates high cure pricing immediately. A cure without monopoly protection has an NPV close to zero because payers always push prices toward marginal cost. Chronic therapies are exactly the type of product where competitive moat, reimbursement stickiness, and prescriber habits create long defensible streams of cash. Again, this is not “subjective.” It’s what actually happens.

And none of this even touches the development side. Investors don’t compare “cure vs cure.” They compare “cure vs chronic,” holding the development cost and probability of failure constant. The expected value formula is simple: EV = p · NPV(revenue) – cost. Since the NPV of chronic therapy revenue is larger in almost every major disease category, the expected value is larger too. This is why cures are pursued only in categories where chronic therapy isn’t viable or the patient population is too small to sustain lifetime sales anyway.

So no, the entire debate isn’t “subjective” and it doesn’t hinge on the mood of a hypothetical pharma executive. It’s math. People call cures a bad business model because superior business models exist and capital flows toward the model with the higher expected return. Chronic care has a structurally higher expected return because the revenue is larger, lasts longer, and is harder to compete away. You can argue about the ethics if you want. But the financial comparison isn’t ambiguous.

You asked for math. Here it is.

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.

Disagree highly with this. It was up to twice a week before AI. Curious why AI made the rate go down.

You seem like a high iq individual. So someone with your intellectual capability must be offended that I would even suggest that HNers love to think of themselves as smart.

There was more prior to AI but yes I exaggerated it. I mean it’s obvious right? The title of this page is hacker so it must be tech related articles every hour.

But articles on IQ and cognition and psychology are extremely common in HN. Enough to be noticeably out of place.

I am unique. Totally. It is not like HN is flooded with cognition or psychology or IQ articles every other hour. Not at all. And whenever one shows up, you do not immediately get a parade of people diagnosing themselves with whatever the headline says. Never happens.
You post something about slow thinking and suddenly half the thread whispers “that is literally me.”
You post something about fast thinking and the other half says “finally someone understands my brain.”
You post something about overthinking and everyone shows up with “wow I feel so seen.”
You post something about attention and now the entire site has ADHD.

But yes. I am the unique one.

It’s not clever to brag about how smart you are or imply you and your entire cohort are smarter than other occupations. It’s a sign of how much you are the opposite of clever.

Additionally the average IQ of software developers is measured to be 110-113. That’s barely above one std of the average so you’re actually wrong. Software devs aren’t particularly clever but a disproportionate number likes to think they are smarter than normal.

So bragging about something that you’re completely wrong about… is that clever? No.