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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is shortsighted. This is not at all egotistical.

Rare diseases are generally not huge money makers for big pharma. That is why there isn't as much money being devoted to them to find a cure. The fact that Larry Page is donating is a great reason to capture some of that long tail for whatever reason.

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I don't care about the egotistical part, but the point about rare diseases is dead wrong - those are exactly the diseases, if suffered by the right (read: wealthy, Western part of the world) that are enormously lucrative to pharma. The diseases that are not lucrative to pharma are things like malaria.

The things most lucrative to pharma are problems whose number of affected patients (x axis) and price to treat (y axis) create a box with the highest volume on a graph. That is, things which are expensive to treat, yet treatable, which many people have (common, not rare). Things like diabetes, cancer, etc. I don't think Hashimoto's thyroiditis would fall into that category.

But, both of your driving factors, affected patients, and price to treat, are in turn driven by other factors such as competition, targeting symptoms, and the cost of research.

While perhaps not blockbuster, orphan drugs for rare diseases can turn quite a profit for pharmaceuticals.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2012/05/02/how-com...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732392610457827...

Of course, that's certainly not Larry Page's fault...

Actually, Congress is thinking of modifying the Orphan Drug Act because pharma has been raking in cash by the ton.

Genzyme was built on rare disease drugs.

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