Comment by quantumwoke
20 days ago
I'm confused by this post because it seems like his partner got best therapy possible with two surgeries followed by medications without going blind or having other major hormonal issues which can happen after surgery. As correctly stated in this thread prolactinomas aren't a death sentence or even (technically) a brain tumour, and the major risks have been avoided so far. What exactly is being accomplished by a VC deeply researching this case beyond satisfying the valid desire to help your life partner?
While uncommon, people deeply researching their loved ones disease have had success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto,_Michaela,_and_Lorenzo...
Even just fundraising for diseases yields tangible results. Some folks dismissed the viral ice bucket challenge, but it raised over $100 million dollars and funded a lot of research in ALS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Bucket_Challenge
Hopefully he accomplishes new knowledge discovery and/or fundraising for research into this disease.
Those efforts were for diseases without treatment. But, prolactinomas already have treatment (surgery plus medication). I always ask myself what is the desired outcome from research effort - in this case it seems to be an attempt to cure/totally eradicate a prolactinoma, which would require hundreds of millions of dollars and custom medication (probably immune checkpoint inhibitors) to do, and this disease already has a treatment available.
A treatment is available but it doesn't seem to work in some cases. The author of the post is motivated to improve that. Honestly, I feel happy when people choose to spend their time trying to solve these types of problems instead of working on things they may not be that interested in or on problems where success doesn't really yield a real benefit to humanity.
Maybe, he spends a lot of time on it and doesn't have success. That seems better to me than spending time on something he doesn't really care about.