It's a bit more complicated than that, I'm afraid. Please read my previous posts. There is no magic bullet, nor will there ever really be-- the variation is massive, to say the least, and the understanding is minimal. People's distrust of large corporations is understandable I suppose, but these are also institutions of science-- people who came from and work with NPOs, academia, etc. The employees do want to cure these diseases and help people on the whole. (Some only care about themselves, of course, but that exists in any area since its a characteristic of mankind). Academics typically don't are about "business" in the literal sense-- they may sell a technology, but very few want to create and run a business. Accordingly they hold no bars as to what they publish and research. Also know that companies themselves still publish in journals as well (and usually quite a bit, too). I think people need to drop the "industry is bad" mantle but whenever there's something that's generally not understood the worst is always assumed. Make no mistake that they're trying to cure it because there is money involved-- since it's not going to be a one-size-fits all job there's going to be plenty of room for plenty of treatments. As I said before pharma has been spending billions and 30 years working on kinase inhibitors, just to name one possible approach.
A pessismistic view undoubtedly garned by lack of understanding. These "fixes" are the best mankind can do, at the moment. And these "fixes" are all competing against eachother. Please read some of my previous posts. Again, when it comes to science there's not a black and white answer-- if a company (lets say Merck and Co, since they're hurting) were to come out with a cure for bladder cancer that covered 90% of the tumor population... you bet your ass they would market that into oblivion to maximise their profits and outcompete their rivals. See, the issue isn't that their colluding to negate treatment, the issue is that there is no quick route to a "cure" at the moment. Biology is complicated-- there's not quick fixes and shortcuts in most cases, at least in regards to cancer.
I dislike to call you out on this... but your notion of a common cold cure exposes your lack of knowledge in the area. There are no cut and dry cures for the common cold, hence why none are offered. A common cold is a viral infection, of which there's probably 30,000 variants at any one time. This means 30,000 differences among themselves, with different genetics, proteins, receptors, etc. When you're designing an anti-viral, you typically want to select for one protein type to knock out of function to stop viral activity. It sounds simple on paper, but in reality it's not. There was an effort awhile ago to target the injection machinery for viruses (I forget which one(s))-- they made inhibitors, etc. Looked good on paper and preliminary tests. Thing is, it failed miserably in animals for one simple reason: most viruses mutate quickly. Very quickly. It's how they survive. You can design a "cure" for something (which may be one of the thousands of common colds), only to have it mutate away the next day... in essence the virus behaves much like your own immune system, which is why your body can cope with it (via polyclonal antibodies and clonal selection, which is a function of mass mutations within the antibody chains). Accordingly the best way to combat the common cold is to use yourself... which is the whole point of vaccines (hence the flu vaccine). The idea here is that you inject a broad range of dead viruses to which your body develops polyclonal antibodies to their features... the next time something similar comes along one of the polyclonals will likely fit and bind even with mass mutations (because the antibodies themselves are mutated)... from here clonal selection pretty much does the rest and your body can cope quickly. I'm simplifying this a lot, but this is exactly why large viral classes cannot be shut down by small molecule therapeutics.
That said, there are some anti-virals out there. They are highly specific and only work on one virus type, which typically does not mutate quickly and retains certain defining features. "The common cold" is not one of those, since it encompasses such a large pool of vastly different organisms. Also note that these antivirals too are still subject to being ineffective through mutations-- tamiflu for swine flu won't work on an increasing percentage of cases, for example. Given the cost to develop these (and the high failure rate), and the massive number it would take to "cure" the common cold, it only makes sense that they're focusing on the important diseases first... a common cold isn't likely to kill you, whereas H1N1, HIV, influenza A and B, etc will. Outside of vaccines there will probably never be a practical antiviral drug for the "common cold."
