November 16, 2025
Cure wars: cash vs care
Goldman Sachs asks in biotech Report: Is curing patients a sustainable business?
Goldman wonders if cures hurt profits — internet cries “Patients over profits”
TLDR: Goldman Sachs asked if one-time cures threaten long-term profits, citing falling hepatitis C sales after high cure rates. The comments exploded: some blasted profit-first logic, others argued cures can be lucrative, and pragmatists said competition would stop anyone from sitting on a cure.
Goldman Sachs dropped a spicy question in a report: are cures bad for business? They point to “one-shot” gene therapies and Gilead’s hepatitis C drugs, which made billions, then saw sales fall as patients got, well… cured. The bank even floated fixes like targeting bigger markets, focusing on common disorders, and constant innovation to keep cash flowing. Cue the comment section combusting.
Outrage poured in: readers called it “profit over patients” and roasted the logic with late-stage capitalism memes. One camp slammed Wall Street for treating “healing” like a subscription model, with egypturnash sneering that in the U.S., someone’s gotta make mad bank off every step. Another camp fired back with receipts: A_D_E_P_T said cures can be wildly profitable, pointing to Hep C’s blockbuster numbers. Meanwhile, pragmatists like snowwrestler argued any company that tries to withhold a cure would get undercut fast, so the market wouldn’t allow it.
The drama: ethics vs earnings, government-funded cures vs private profit, and a “Goldman B-team” jab for extra spice. Jokes flew (“Imagine Netflix, but for illness”), but the core clash was deadly serious: should curing people threaten revenue, or should the system reward curing more? The comments didn’t just react—they raged.
Key Points
- •Goldman Sachs’ report “The Genome Revolution” questions the revenue sustainability of one-shot cures from gene and cell therapies.
- •Analyst Salveen Richter notes that curative treatments reduce recurring revenue by shrinking the pool of treatable patients, especially in infectious diseases.
- •Gilead Sciences’ hepatitis C therapies achieved >90% cure rates; U.S. sales peaked at $12.5B in 2015 and are estimated to fall below $4B this year.
- •Where incident pools remain stable (e.g., cancer), cures pose less risk to franchise sustainability than in diseases where incidence falls after cures.
- •Proposed strategies include targeting large markets (e.g., hemophilia), addressing high-incidence disorders (e.g., SMA), and continuous innovation/portfolio expansion (e.g., inherited retinal diseases).