Its like cancer research in the 70s. Lots of money focused on a couple of areas of drug development (like chemo), but the real progress is going to come from long term, deep mechanistic research. We spent so much money on cancer treatments in the 70s, but the real impact came from the work that slowly revealed the underpinnings of cancer as a genetic disease as well as the development of new modalities of treatment (immunotherapy) that paid massive dividends down the line. In the same way, I think we need deeper fundamental understandings of the disease, and that combining those with the explosion in new treatment modalities we've seen over the past two decades (e.g. cell and gene therapies etc.) Is whats going to get us over the finish line. Until then, might as well keep throwing immunotherapies at whatever targets we find hoping one of them will stick, the same way we did cancer research with small molecules decades ago.
But both were definitely worth while. No doubt chemo has saved/extended lines, and most likely a winnable research goal in the short term, while the investments needed (e.g. immuno/genetic therapy and etiologies, was simply beyond the near term capabilities of science in the 70's.
