The context of a "Minimum Viable Product" is a mental model of products, markets, and profitability. There is a fundamental difference between the goal "cure cancer" and the goal "make money from a cancer cure". The perverse incentives and loopholes of the latter are a serious impediment to the former.
People celebrate Jonahs Salk because not only did he develop the polio vaccine but he rejected his opportunity to massively profit from it because it was more important that patients have access.
No company that develops a cancer cure these days would do that. Their shareholders would revolt, their boards would fire their exeutives, their stock prices would plunge, and their competitors would pile on.
The incentive is to continuously charge these people for the rest of their life. They make more money if you stay sick, so they can keep treating you.
If you are cured, then the flow of money stops until you get sick again.
If, however, after a lot of work, a cure seems elusive, it makes sense to focus on treatment. Both for the sinister reason that people pay more over a lifetime for treatments, but also for the less sinister reason that it's usually much easier to develop treatments than cures, and having a treatment and not having a cure is strictly better than not having a treatment and also not having a cure.
What is stopping them from discovering a cure, patenting it, and then never manufacturing it?
Also, this presupposes that the companies are actively trying to do evil. In reality, most people would rather have cancer cured than not cured. The profit motive can bend these incentives, but I think the caricature of a company full of amoral sociopaths making decisions to maximize human suffering are kind of... unrealistic.