* There has been media coverage of Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD (the virus) and it has been terrible, on the order of homeopathy and nanotechnology; there is good science behind the virus, but it's been tainted by association with its promoters.
* Any evidence for the effectiveness of the virus is preclinical and mouse-modeled. Which, even if you have only a superficial understanding of pharma science, you'd learn from a few years of HN coverage of new drugs that mouse models are a very weak signal.
* Making a "cancer-busting" virus isn't hard, or at least, has been a process understood for some cancers since the '90s. What's hard is a viral therapy that won't kill the patient, such as by dissolving the patient's liver (a particular concern with neuroendocrine tumors since they metastasize to the liver first, and because things that target those tumors also tend to target liver cells). There are clever ideas in Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD to that effect, but they are totally unproven.
* As usual, the argument that Big Pharma can't monetize something like this and therefore it's not being tested is BS. There's an open field of work that can be undertaken to refine and productize something like this --- again, it's at mouse models today --- and all that work is patentable.
* The more likely reason this research hasn't gone anywhere is that gene therapy is out of fashion in oncology.
How about we crowdfund scientific research by giving some of our taxes to the NSF/NIH and letting them vet proposals? If you want even more crowdfunding, then you can mail a check to your favorite funding agency, I'm sure they will appreciate it.
Crowdfunding by having random individuals donate to specific projects is a horrible idea. Normal people aren't qualified, and it's easy to mislead.
Magical virus in freezer in Sweden that cures cancer. But...
"Big business won’t stump up the £2million needed to fund the first stage of clinical trials, because there is no money to be made."
People really just don't understand how pharmaceuticals work. There are piles and piles of evils in the industry that range from stupidity to misprioritization to valuing the dollar over human lives, but a couple million dollars of investment for an even unlikely cure for cancer is something most companies would jump at.
No kidding, if it's a virus just let it spread, in a few years the world should be cancer free.
If you look a little further into that freezer you can also find 1930s designs for magic carburetors that get 90 mpg, and other machines that extract zero point energy, at the very bottom is a machine that transmutes lead into gold, unfortunately other alchemists during the 1400s used patents and other tricks to keep this magical machine from us for over 600 years.
I can't help but wonder: Societies in the past would not put such a decision on the hands of non-experts, perhaps because there were too many uninformed citizens. Have we advanced to the point where the general public (or even the slightly more educated part that is likely to crowdfund stuff) is qualified to make decisions by committee that are right/good?
iCancer, really? If you're going to be playing on 'the cancer that killed Steve Jobs', go talk to his heirs: I'm sure they've got a spare $2million to throw at some homeopathic cure for cancer.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/another-cancer...
Bullets:
* There has been media coverage of Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD (the virus) and it has been terrible, on the order of homeopathy and nanotechnology; there is good science behind the virus, but it's been tainted by association with its promoters.
* Any evidence for the effectiveness of the virus is preclinical and mouse-modeled. Which, even if you have only a superficial understanding of pharma science, you'd learn from a few years of HN coverage of new drugs that mouse models are a very weak signal.
* Making a "cancer-busting" virus isn't hard, or at least, has been a process understood for some cancers since the '90s. What's hard is a viral therapy that won't kill the patient, such as by dissolving the patient's liver (a particular concern with neuroendocrine tumors since they metastasize to the liver first, and because things that target those tumors also tend to target liver cells). There are clever ideas in Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD to that effect, but they are totally unproven.
* As usual, the argument that Big Pharma can't monetize something like this and therefore it's not being tested is BS. There's an open field of work that can be undertaken to refine and productize something like this --- again, it's at mouse models today --- and all that work is patentable.
* The more likely reason this research hasn't gone anywhere is that gene therapy is out of fashion in oncology.