Does anyone else have this thought?  Crashed out early this evening, and when I woke up I started to go over the Beacon Report again, in particular the part about The Complement section on slides 16 and 17, because this is an area that I have difficulty wrapping my head around.  

My limited understanding of this "cascade" is that diseases can start at the top, and then filter, or cascade, their way down.  And often, or perhaps pretty much all of the time, we're treating the diseases where they're located, rather than stopping them where they start....which the author seems to think Apabetalone may be able to do.

It suggests that the reason Apabetalone may be so exciting is that it could be used to treat a whole boat load of conditions.  The company is targetting CKD and CVD now, with a Fabry's trial on tap also.  But these conditions may just be part of this "cascade", conditions that are treated as a result of Apabetalone's MOA at the top of the complement system.  Who knows?  Those in the dosed arm of BETonMACE may be preventing cancer from matasticizing as an added benefit to reducing their risk of heart attack and stroke.

We all know the Pharmaceutical Industry is in the hundreds of billions in annual revenue, maybe even trillions.  Just checked, the industry as a whole topped $1 Trillion USD in 2014.  That's a spicy meatball to quote my hero Homer Simpson.

We all know people who think that Big Pharma has a cure for cancer that they're sitting on...you see it on social media all the time.  Onocology is one of the biggest cash machines in the Pharma space, so the thinking is that BP doesn't want a cure, not when they're earning hundreds of millions from treating it.  

The same goes for other things, some people believe we could all be driving automobiles that run on water if it wasn't for the profits coming from Big Oil.  

Would BP really be interested in a drug that potentially could render a good chunk of their products obsolete?  Older individuals with their blister packs of meds to be taken morning, noon and night provide huge revenues.  

Anyone else had similar thoughts?