This news story has all the makings for a medical thriller. Suppose there’s a doctor who comes up with this treatment, it could be HIV in the story or some other invented disease, but a big pharmaceutical company tries to stop the doctor from releasing his work because they make money off of their own drugs to manage the symptoms.
This could be a lot of money, and the big pharma doesn’t want to lose on this source of revenue.
The stakes could increase throughout the story, going from simple legal battles to physical damage to the lab, and it could end with the doctor’s life being put at risk.
This could also be a series. Once this doctor becomes known for coming out on top against large corporations, other doctors come to him for help to get their own drugs out to the rest of the world at large.
Another book in the series could be another one of his own discoveries, where he’s put into the same situation against a more powerful opponent, maybe the government of his own country.
One of his motivations for curing the diseases could be that his own family member suffers from the illness.
A final book could have him risk his life to go against a government that wants to stop a cure, developed by another country, from getting out, and he sacrifices himself for the greater good. Maybe he dies, or maybe he gets thrown in jail, where he has to cure another outbreak behind bars. OR the government holding him gets him back out to solve a pandemic, believing in his reputation for developing cures.
The roots of this story come straight from recent headlines: A London man was cured of HIV after receiving an experimental stem cell transplant.
Scientists have assumed the absence of the virus for thirty months means the patient has been cured.
The patient underwent a bone marrow transplant to help treat his blood cancer. The donor was known to have a mutation that made them resistant to HIV and the hope was that the transplant would allow the recipient to also develop resistance for themselves. The trouble was that the patient already had HIV so they weren’t sure if the resistance would cure him. It did. Now scientists are looking at the experimental procedure to see if anything can be learned which would cure HIV for good.
