There is a bright future for companies that choose to focus on being the best at treating just a few diseases, which offer high-margin, if not high-volume, sales.

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Three other medicines sold by the company treat diseases that occur in just a few thousand people.

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It is not a matter of so many diseases, so few days.

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Mayo Clinic vaccine researcher Gregory Poland counts more than a dozen new diseases that have emerged in the last few decades: HIV, Lyme disease, West Nile virus, avian influenza.

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For more than a century there were few restrictions other than barring those with communicable diseases.

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There are turning out to be precious few genetic risk factors for common diseases that have a major impact on an individual.

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If the commission's recommendations become policy, Africans may well have perfect access to drugs in a few years only to find there are few drugs for the diseases they face.

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Researchers can rapidly prove their drug is hitting its intended target in trials of a few dozen people, then move into large and costly trials in more common diseases.

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For diseases such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, which involve one or a few inherited genetic changes, clinical trials are attempting to introduce the correct versions of faulty genes into patients.

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