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The case for MedicOath
The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed.
$1B+
Minimum annual revenue to justify pharmaceutical drug development
A drug must generate over one billion dollars annually to justify development. Most diseases don't have enough patients — or enough patients who can pay.
Chagas disease: 7 million infected, 90% in poverty. Zero major pharmaceutical investment in 30 years. The chronic phase — which causes fatal heart failure — has no approved treatment.
Buruli ulcer: 150,000 cases per year. One antibiotic treatment exists. It was discovered by academics, not pharma. The 8-week course is impractical where healthcare infrastructure barely exists.
Nodding syndrome: affects 10,000 children in East Africa. Cause unknown. Zero clinical trials running. The children affected have no voice and no purchasing power.
$1T
Global spending on drugs functionally identical to cheaper alternatives
When a drug patent expires, companies modify it slightly to extend their monopoly — rather than invest in genuinely new treatments.
Prilosec → Nexium: AstraZeneca took omeprazole, made its mirror-image molecule, and spent $500 million marketing it as a new drug when the patent expired. Same mechanism. Same effect. New patent.
Humira: AbbVie made over 100 minor patent modifications to block generic competition for 20 years. Humira earned $200 billion in total sales. The molecule itself cost a fraction of that to develop.
Result: an estimated $1 trillion in global spending on drugs that are functionally identical to cheaper, off-patent alternatives. Every dollar spent on evergreened drugs is a dollar not spent on novel science.
50%
Of all clinical trials never publish their results
Negative results are rarely published. Companies are not required to publish failed trials. The next researcher doesn't know it was tried. They run the same trial, fail again, don't publish. The cycle repeats.
Tamiflu: governments stockpiled $18 billion worth. Roche withheld clinical trial data for 10 years. When finally released, a Cochrane review found it barely worked better than paracetamol.
Reboxetine: published trials showed this antidepressant worked. Unpublished trials — three times more data — showed it didn't. It was prescribed to millions of people based on incomplete evidence.
Vioxx: Merck knew of cardiovascular risk years before withdrawal. An estimated 55,000 people died. The data existed. It was suppressed.
95%
Of rare diseases have no approved treatment
If fewer than 200,000 people have a disease, it's classified as “rare”. Rare diseases get rare attention.
7,000 rare diseases identified. Treatments exist for fewer than 5%. The other 95% have nothing — not because the science is impossible, but because the economics don't justify the investment.
Progeria: a rapid-aging disease affecting 400 children worldwide. First treatment approved in 2020 — 113 years after the disease was first described.
Neglected Tropical Diseases: affect 1.7 billion people, almost entirely in low-income countries. They received 0.6% of global health R&D funding in 2022. That's not neglect by accident. It's neglect by design.
0
Patents available on existing drugs — so nobody funds repurposing research
Existing approved drugs often work against diseases they were never tested for. Nobody funds the research because you can't patent an existing drug.
Metformin (diabetes, 1957): strong evidence for cancer prevention, aging, Alzheimer's. Off-patent. Costs pennies. Zero pharmaceutical investment in repurposing.
Ivermectin (antiparasitic): evidence for multiple cancers. Off-patent. Largely uninvestigated for oncology use because there's no money in proving it works.
Aspirin: evidence for colorectal cancer prevention has existed for decades. Off-patent since 1917. No funded large-scale trials until the 2020s.
12–15 years
Average time from laboratory discovery to approved drug
Academic research produces promising compounds constantly. The gap between lab discovery and clinical trial is called the Valley of Death. Most promising science dies here — unfunded and unpublished.
Average cost: $2.6 billion per drug (Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development)
Success rate: 1 in 10,000 candidate compounds reaches patients
But: most of that cost is profit-padding, not science. The Medicines for All Institute has demonstrated that many drugs can be developed for under $1 billion using open methods. The cost is a choice, not a law of physics.
None of the above is inevitable. It is a choice — made by a system optimised for return on investment, not return on human life.
$2
Cost of one complete AI-powered cure discovery run on MedicOath
$2.6B
Average pharmaceutical drug development cost
55
Novel therapeutic hypotheses generated in our first week
0
Patents filed. Every discovery is CC0. Public domain.
We took ours.