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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

A huge amount is invested in Alzheimer’s, but comparing to aids and hiv isn’t a reasonable thing to do:

HIV and AIDS kill people, and they do so quickly.

There’s also a foothold on how to treat it - whereas for Alzheimer’s we don’t even have an understanding of what actually causes it. Once we know the actual cause I suspect we’ll see research funds skyrocket.

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Alzheimers scares me more than HIV/AIDS.

We know how the latter are spread (body fluid contact), and that the virus doesn't live very long outside the body. As a result the precautions needed to ensure I don't personally get it are in general easy to follow. (nothing is perfect but the odds are strongly against me getting it)

Alzheimer's is an unknown. I have no idea if something I'm doing now puts me at risk or not.

Alzheimer leads to death also. If it progresses far enough, people lose bodily functions and die. It's very common die from pneumonia when ability to swallow decreases and patients get food into their lungs.

> Once we know the actual cause I suspect we’ll see research funds skyrocket

I agree with your hypothesis, but saying it out loud seems backwards. In an ideal world, wouldn't we see research funds rise now in order to discover the cause (the hard part) rather than for the treatment (the less hard part).

no - there's a huge amount of research already happening, but the biggest cost in drug development occurs after you have a target. The reason funding appears low, is because the expensive parts of drug discovery are late in the process - things like the large scale trials, etc. I would not be surprised if (I have not looked it up) a significant contributor to the amount spent on research in HIV is on late stage trials, because realistically at this point the majority of new HIV drugs should actually work, and you need the large scale tests to see if the drugs work better.

I'd like to see sources please, since I don't believe that claim. The years and years of research of many teams all over the world should exceed the amount of money required for large-scale trials by orders of magnitude.

Please note that I don't speak of an individual research team but of all teams globally combined working on that goal.

I'm sure that for any given drug you'll see a pattern of later research costing more, but as a field, unless we happen to get lucky early on with figuring out the basic science (which we clearly didn't with neurodegeneration), we'll need years (or decades to centuries - emperor of all maladies is an excellent read into the amount of work and time it took to understand cancer to the level we do now) to understand what to spend money on drugs on, and we'll have to pay for all the dead ends there too.

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