Lest anyone be confused by that headline, there are 6 other nonprofits in the current batch. So there is a 7-way tie for 2nd nonprofit.
Do you have a link to the startups? As an International Development grad this is very exciting.
Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
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Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#72I'm all for this; more power to them. However, HIV/AIDS is already very preventable and had been on the decline for a decade or more. I'd rather see something like this effort, but for cancer. A disease that affects many more people. Actually, what I really want to see it a focus on stopping poaching, whaling, habitat destruction and ocean acidification. Even with all the disease, humans don't seem to have issues rep…
HIV/AIDS is a giant problem. North of 35MM people are living with HIV worldwide and more are infected every day. Yes we have made strides in reducing infection rates, but we are far from solving this problem with existing approaches. To put this in context, nearly 5,000 people a day die from AIDS. That is like 10 747s falling out of the sky every single day. The only solution is a vaccine which is why we are doing wh…
Awesome. I'm certainly glad people care enough to work on these types of real issues.
Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there some special "trick" that makes your team/approach so efficient or (just) the usual ones, e.g. less overhead due to small size, less bureaucracy than big pharma and so on?
Yes our overhead is far lower. Our other "trick" is that several members of our team are multi-talented. For example Dr. Herst can do tissue culture work, formulation development, analytical chemistry, and immunochemistry.
I really really from all of my heart wish that your project will work. Seriously, the idea of a free HIV vaccine is amazing. But honestly, I believe that you might all be a bit naive when it comes to doing proper molecular biology experiments. There's a reason why most PhD students need several years to finish their studies and they mostly use just a few techniques. Doing experiments with humanized mice and HIV might sound easy on paper, but will turn out to be way more complicated than what you believe it to be now.
Trust me, been there, done that.
Anyways, I wish you all the best, I love it when people challenge old dogmas with new ideas.
I'd appreciate it a lot if you could put some more information about the biology, especially the role if the immune system, online.
Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they mean they train the immune system by creating an antigen, not an antibody, that mimics or is identical to the nonmutating antigen on the virus. Your immune system upregulates appropriate antibodies on its own through a feedback effect when certain cells (B cell?) that have randomly generated embedded antibodies on their cell membranes come across an antigen. These cells begin to divide faster, and the ch…
Fascinating! What do you think the best resource is for brushing up on this stuff? I haven't had a good biology class for a while.
I'd say watch the Kahn academy biology videos, his wife is an immunologist or something so it had a big focus on the adaptive immune system. Goodsell's "The Machinery of Life" is really good too, but for molecular bio in general.
Those and just random magazine articles, etc. are really the only two things read/watched though, so others may know of some better options.
Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ian- YOU developed the vaccine for HIV? Were you part of some team from a university? Or did some other company develop the real science and you are partnering with them? How can you offer everyone in the world a free vaccine for your crowdfunding target of only $500K? where does the money you raise go?
If you look at the fundraising page they have a budget but it looks like the $500k just pays for the next experiment it wont even get them to Phase 1. Microsoft Research gave them $1M to get this far.
I did some more research and would really like a clarifcation of this project.
First of all - Flow Pharma is the inventor of the vsaccine - they are a FOR PROFIT angel backed company. Why do they need crowdfunding?
Second - How does Immunity project work? It seems that the real non-profit is "Until there is a cure". So you are donating money to them, which then give the money to the immunity project which pays for a trial of an unproven drug for a FOR prfit company.
This is a fantastic project and I promise I will donate if you have full disclosure. thank you for doing this.
Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#76This is very good news. Good luck.
Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#77Lest anyone be confused by that headline, there are 6 other nonprofits in the current batch. So there is a 7-way tie for 2nd nonprofit.
Maybe I'm blind or searchiotic but cliffs on what the other 6 are doing?
I think YC is one of the few places that could actually disrupt the academic publishing and reputation-bargaining field so I'm hoping some nonprofit will tackle this eventually.
Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#78How heavily does the project depend on obtaining correct target epitopes from Heckerman's protein Gibbs free energy simulation?
Is there a chance that HIV won't be controlled even if we can induce the immune system to be capable of targeting some of the peptide sequences that controllers often target? (i.e., might there be something else at work in controllers?)
Thanks for working on an important project!
Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#79I'm all for this; more power to them. However, HIV/AIDS is already very preventable and had been on the decline for a decade or more. I'd rather see something like this effort, but for cancer. A disease that affects many more people. Actually, what I really want to see it a focus on stopping poaching, whaling, habitat destruction and ocean acidification. Even with all the disease, humans don't seem to have issues rep…
Bill Gates just addressed this [1], showing the faulty thinking behind this idea that saving lives is ultimately bad for the earth.
"It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too.
This pattern of falling death rates followed by falling birth rates applies for the vast majority of the world. Demographers have written a lot about this phenomenon. The French were the first to start this transition, toward the end of the 18th century. In France, average family size went down every decade for 150 years in a row. In Germany, women started having fewer children in the 1880s, and in just 50 years family size had mostly stabilized again. In Southeast Asia and Latin America, average fertility dropped from six or seven children per woman to two or three in a single generation, thanks in large measure to the modern contraceptives available by the 1960s.
Because most countries—with exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—have now gone through this transition, the global population is growing more slowly every year. As Hans Rosling, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and one of my favorite data geeks, said, “The amount of children in the world today is probably the most there will be! We are entering into the age of the Peak Child!”"
Saving lives will improve humanity and -- as humanity has discovered -- actually contributes to fewer births. This is one of the reasons we see shrinking populations in 25 nations including Japan, Ukraine, Italy, Greece. [2]
The reality is that saving lives counterintuitively decreases population through lower birth rates, which may ultimately help the earth.
Also, observe that the world is at its highest population today, and yet, billions of humans are totally resource-secure. Why this counter-intuitive phenomenon? It's largely thanks to technological advancements in farming and genetics. There is no reason to believe this trend will not continue.
[1]: http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/?cid=bg_gn_ll0_01202...
Re: Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator
#80I'd like to understand why organisations like the Gates Foundation / NIH aren't excited by this approach? I'm assuming they've rejected this, which would explain the need to crowdfinance the next part. If they haven't rejected it, why aren't they being approached for grants? Also, where's the science? Having something in the FAQ that states "We're awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed journal" is, to be blunt, pret…
In some areas it’s usual to publish the preprints, for example in the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/ “Open access to 909,134 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics” In some other areas, the journals have more strictly policies, and don’t like preprints, reprints, free author pdf copies, ... I’d really like to see a peer-review article, even if that mean…
In a fair amount of Biology and Medicine, it's not at all common practice to place a pre-print in arXiv. It doesn't surprise me even a little that the folks here haven't done so.