Unless that treatment were to be a simple virus either injected into a tumor or an IV drip. Then there wouldn't be much money for that treatment now would there? As you google the rio virus and other possible virus treatments for cancer you should notice a trend. All the companies that are doing clinical trials have tried to *modify* the virus in some way in order to make in "novel" so they can patent it. The goal is NOT to find a cure for any type of cancer - it is to find a "novel" cure that can be patented.
Did you read the article? The treatment is novel. The fact that a virus exists which can fight certain types of cancer cells means absolutely zero if you can't find a way to deliver the treatment. That's the treatment. Randomly infecting yourself with the virus isn't going to work. That's where the research comes in.
For the record: There are many, many examples of pharmaceutical drugs based on natural compounds. The novel parts of these compounds are their concentrations, what they're combined with, how they're administered, etc. It's why pharmaceutical companies exist: The stuff you dig up out of the ground can be, but often isn't, as effective as what you can synthesize if you know what you're doing with chemistry and biology.
Recently I read another article about a researcher who had a potential cure in his lab, but since he had already published his work it was no longer patentable, so they needed to find a way to make it novel before any serious funding (needed for more research and then clinical trials) could be had. He claimed he was not unique, there are many researchers that have something that works in certain conditions (rats, specific scenarios, etc) but it's hard enough to figure out who to fund without the problems of making sure the result is proprietary.
I'm not really certain what your first sentence means here. If it's a novel treatment, it's patentable. If the researcher already produced results that showed a treatment was possible with a certain compound, and he didn't use the compound somehow for his company, then just what were they paying him for? The whole point of research is to find these things out.
It's not clear to me what the solution to this is other than funding the researchers who are actually doing worthwhile research instead of trying to figure out a way to modify existing drugs in order to get another 20 years of patent protection on a new variant.
The system is, to a degree, self-correcting, in that sense. You can modify existing drugs and renew patents to a certain degree, but they give diminishing returns until the next breakthrough drug -- especially as patents run out on the original compound. Example: Tylenol is still a big drug, but not as big as before every major pharmacy had a generic brand of acetaminophen they sold.
Pain is one of those things that demonstrates my larger point, though: You've got lots of drugs to treat pain, but there's still a huge market for it. No "cure for pain" has decimated the market.
And yet you can get married at 16. You people have your priorities so arse backwards it's amazing you survive.
In most jurisdictions in the U.S., marriage under the age of 18 requires parental consent. The marrying age being lower than the drinking age has at least one benefit: You're less likely to show up drunk for your wedding.
I think it's much more of a scandal that the driving age is lower than the drinking age. I would rather kids get some experience with alcohol's effects (moreso than just sneaking alcohol from their parents' liquor cabinet) before they started driving. It seems like a bad idea to me to have kids driving around without experience of how alcohol can affect them if they decide to get behind the wheel.
Disraeli was pretty close: actually, there are Lies, Damn lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, and Delivery dates.