Curing diabetes isn’t as profitable as selling insulin. That’s why it doesn’t get funded.
Then you opined that whoever comes up with a cure wins, which should be true in a perfect world. In fact, most researchers would agree with you.
Unfortunately, a lot of MBA’s in these pharma companies don’t see it that way, and my reply to you was trying to outline the realities of that. I focussed more on the patent-and-bury part because this is the one method less known to the public (and less used), but underfunding research that can do a public good but isn’t profitable is a common technique by corporations in research, regardless of the discipline.
My bad, I thought this was common knowledge, but it probably isn’t for people who aren’t in PhD/post-doc research roles.