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San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

timesofsandiego.com

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Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#31

Post by dnautics »

pinaceae wrote: post #28
zobzu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually says millions of USD or billions. ie not necessarily 1 billion+ I'm also wondering/suspecting these costs are very much tied to the USA which has a pretty specific model and costs involved. I wouldn't be surprised if the development, of similar quality, would be much cheaper outside the USA. (yes i have noticed this guy is crowdfunding from the USA)

still needs to be approved by the FDA, as the rest of the world is using this for guidance. majority of drug development is not the actual science work, but tons of paperwork and audit trails. as history has proven if you play fast and loose here a lot of people will be hurt or killed. you need to document every step along the way. and once clinical trials start, the scrutiny increases, a lot. there is a now a fast t…

This is exactly why I'm only interested in crowdfunding a single, early stage, experiment.

Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#33

Post by [deleted] »

31reasons wrote: post #25
protonfish wrote: post #23

What I don't understand is why drugs developed with public money (government grants and non-profit charities) aren't automatically in the public domain.

You need public money to help innovation but you still need individual's greed to make it happen. Would you spend your entire lifetime building something and you get nothing in return other than pat on your back ?

[deleted]

Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#34

Post by anonbanker »

Talk about burying a lead; Yonemoto is demonstrating that the open source model can be applied to other areas of knowledge and industry. They're merely using Cancer as a focal point.

I look forward to a future where one project to cure an ailment is forked, because the project leaders were impeding progress.

Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#35

Post by adamt »

ig1 wrote: post #14

People don't seem to realize how expensive it is to bring a new pharmaceutical drug to market and why this approach won't work. A typical drug will cost between $1bn-$2bn and take about a decade of work by the time it hits the shelves. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_development has details for those interested) Crowdfunding at those sort of levels just isn't feasible yet.

I will freely admit I know very little about the pharmaceutical world, but my (perhaps dumb) question is what scope is there to disrupt these typical costs.

For example it used to be that space programs cost billions, yet India has just put a Mars orbital in place for $74m. I am old enough to remember when it was the received wisdom that people believed an e-commerce website would cost $1m, yet many startups launch their first site with less then 0.1% of that.

How much of that $1bn-$2bn typical cost is open to similar levels of disruption?

Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#36

Post by dnautics »

rgejman wrote: post #13
dnautics wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is that a bait? I'm pretty damn serious about that. Anyone who knows me knows that I have been a very fervent anti-patent person for years now. It's caused problems in places that I have worked. I think it's correct to say that I am not going to crowdfund the entire drug development. Accordingly, that is not the plan . My vision is that the first stage (well second, really) is crowdfunded to show that there is br…

The "bait" is the claim that a patent-less drug will be cheaper when it finally comes into use in the clinic than a patented drug (from your indysci campaign: "Releasing without a patent means the drugs will be cheaper and it will be easier to build on the work to make improved drugs or drug combinations. Releasing without a patent means expanded access to drugs in countries that can't afford extensive licensing and…

Typically industrial compound leads are developed in closed, siloed situations, because if you disclose you jeopardize your patent status. Of course, "open sourcing" doesn't guaranteed development in non-siloed environments either (you could just fail to 'git push' on a mistake branch), but it does somewhat eliminate the incentives to do so. Perhaps the wording ("it will be easier to build on the work to make improved drugs or drug combinations") on my attempt to analogize that is bad for being unspecific. Do you have a suggestion on how I might change that on the page to better reflect this concept?

Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#37

Post by donpdonp »

31reasons wrote: post #25
protonfish wrote: post #23

What I don't understand is why drugs developed with public money (government grants and non-profit charities) aren't automatically in the public domain.

You need public money to help innovation but you still need individual's greed to make it happen. Would you spend your entire lifetime building something and you get nothing in return other than pat on your back ?

Consider people who have spent their life around people who are dying from X. They might be highly motivated to come up with a solution where the result is its own reward - the elimination of X.

Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#38

Post by tmuir »

To everyone sure this will fail because of the amount of money required, ask yourself this: if you told your mom, and your neighbor, and your mailman, and your boss about the Occulus Rift, or Pebble, or The Peachy Printer, or Zach Braff's latest movie, and the opportunity to help make those products a reality by preordering them/donating money to them, do you really think any sizable portion of those people would be interested enough to donate? Of course not.

Most successful Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns have an extremely narrow market, the early adopters of technology. Cancer casts a wider net by several orders of magnitude. There's no reason to think that, with a good viral marketing campaign, something like this couldn't raise several orders of magnitude more money than the most successful crowdfunding campaigns so far.

Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#39

Post by dnautics »

rgejman wrote: post #18
exratione wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This displays a profound ignorance of the real situation, which is that the majority of useful early stage research is funded by philanthropy. Not by government, not by companies, but by people making donations. It doesn't come from the existing funding institutions because they almost never fund anything that hasn't already had its prototype and early stage research completed successfully. If you don't have your pro…

These philanthropic organizations almost always have either (a) committees made up of scientists that decide where the money should be allocated (e.g. HHMI) or (b) donate to institutions which then dole out money internally as project grants that are vetted by other scientists. Philanthropic organizations don't generally just hand out money to the person who makes the flashiest video.

The question boils down to a real-world application of which is a bigger fallacy, the appeal to authority or the appeal to majority. Well, I don't think there is a good answer to that. But let's get serious here. I'm asking for 50k to do one experiment. Microsoft just paid one billion for minecraft.

Re: San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

#40

Post by rhino369 »

protonfish wrote: post #23

What I don't understand is why drugs developed with public money (government grants and non-profit charities) aren't automatically in the public domain.

From what I understand, public money does not go to individual drug research, but goes towards more basic and foundational research. Drugs are built on top of the foundational knowledge, but the patents for those drugs do not then cover the foundational knowledge.

For example, if public research discovers what triggers cancer cells to multiply, drug companies will scramble to make drugs to prevent it. But the drug company cannot just patent the knowledge about the trigger. If a second drug company finds a second way to prevent the trigger, they can make it, no problem.

Maybe I'm just not aware of direct public funding to drug companies.

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