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HIV is a different animal from most viruses since it targets the immune cells, the very thing that allows vaccines to work, so I imagine its a lot more complicated than other vaccines to develop.
The HIV vaccine mutates quickly enough that the host never develops immunity themselves, which makes triggering immunity with a vaccine very difficult.
Having spent some time at a Fortune 500 company I cannot imagine a day where someone voluntarily creates a plan to eliminate billions of dollars of sales in monthly doses of medicine in exchange for a single or double dose per patient product. Corporations just don't think like that. Some might say it's even illegal for them to value the patients over the shareholders under current regulations.
I take your point on the complexity of HIV. However there are creative strategies that can be used like targeting surface proteins (?) perhaps. There are a great many intelligent people in the field. I have dim memories of work showing promise in the early years of the disease. It seems to have gone silent after the introduction of the drug cocktail approach. Coincidence? Perhaps...
This is generally reason enough for companies to do what they will, consequences be damned.
The OPs conspiracies don’t hold any water to reality.
The reason for drug prices are randomly spiking in the US (for a small minority of drugs lucky enough to be in FDA backlogs) is mostly unrelated to the R&D side: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-d...
I'm sorry but there isn't a global conspiracy to stop development of an HIV vaccine. Much of what big pharma does is incredibly cyncial and deserves scrutiny, but even viewing it within that lens, there is a clear business case here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
I didn't downvote it, but it isn't exactly hard to see why some might. It is less that HN is "ridiculously polarized" and more that the signal:noise on that specific comment is exceptionally low.
[0] https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/lab-report/cells-stand-way-of...
"Could it be because charging people $1000++ a month for drugs, for the rest of their life, is a better business model?" Or could it be that the poster hadn't bothered to look at the reasons.
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/developme...
I like the idea of using DNA that will generate HIV antigens versus the classic approach.
I may have to recant in light of this evidence. Thank you for the links.
A better thing for people to do would have been to just reply with the kind of information that you provided.
I could just as well say something like "it's interesting that the WTC collapsed the way it did in 9/11. Could it be because if it toppled over then the damage would have been too catastrophic? I'm just making an economics argument!"
Stop right there. I'm not attempting to "spin" anything.
I find it hard to believe that we couldn't moonshot an HIV/AIDS vaccine or cure, but it's also clear that the incentive isn't there. That doesn't take a conspiracy, just the people who could fund an organize a concerted, focused global effort simply not caring enough about a disease that is still stigmatized by its infection rate among "gays, druggies, and blacks" (particularly when they can rent-seek on bodies that have historically been commodified anyway).
> As far as I'm aware, there's no expensive drug that suppresses Ebola symptoms.
"In the light of this I find it very surprising that drug companies haven't developed a drug that allows them to charge people $1000++ a month for drugs, for the rest of their life, isn't that a better business model? How on earth did the companies allow this vaccine research to escape?!!
If the OP had done even a little bit of research, they would have quickly realized that AIDS has unique properties that makes making a vaccine incredibly complicated despite a ton of effort that has gone into it so far.
Run the numbers on all HIV patients requiring perpetual treatment versus a vaccine slowly eliminating the virus from the population over 5,10 and 20 years.
Vaccines are not a great business model compared to the latter. Analogous to the dearth of Antibiotic research currently. Other drugs like statins for example are much more profitable due to perpetual use requirement.
Where would you invest the companies resources if you were running the show? And make no mistake. The resources are finite when you are charged with growing multi tens of billions of annual revenue. Miss by 5% and your head rolls and your stock options are upside down. So place your bets wisely.
And I would argue that an AIDS vaccine, like Gilead’s cure for HCV, could be priced quite aggressively.
A chronic treatment does not suggest a continued stream of revenue as competitors often enter the market with 2nd generation products.
I read that Genoya for AIDS generated $4.8B USD in 2018 and Truvada, by the same company, Gilead, generated another $3B USD. So that's almost $8B per year and Truvada has a 3 year CAGR of 82% so it's really grabbing market share.
To your point there are other companies with competitive products but Gilead seems to be the leader.
My point is simply that one model, drugs at 8B per year, assumes a continuous disease state while the other at 5B per year assumes a continuous reduction in diseased hosts as was seen with Polio, Smallpox and until recently +measles for example.
One is better for the corporation. The other better for the commons. That's all I got.
+Measles was declared eradicated, in the USA, early in this century.