

Crowd-funding Preventive Treatment for Breast Cancer - bmahmood
https://www.microryza.com/projects/can-we-prevent-the-transmission-of-brca-mutations

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streptomycin
How is anyone supposed to evaluate the scientific merits of something like
this? Or do we want funding based only on buzzwords, SEO, and video production
skills?

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perchance
NIH and NSF are often criticized for slow decisions, but a major reason for
that is: experimental science is difficult and slow. Software people find this
hard to comprehend, e.g. why would it take 10 years to find a new treatment?
That's because you find an affected family (if it's hereditary), find
appropriate controls, map the mutation, make a mouse model, use the mouse
model to screen for pharmacological agents, and return to humans for testing
them.

Microryza needs a vetting mechanism, at the very minimum, perhaps a dedicated
science advisory board. Otherwise it runs a high risk of becoming a platform
for snake oil salespeople.

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timr
Agreed...but: the NSF and NIH are sadly underfunded these days. Good research
is getting left behind, because funding levels are up in the top 1% of grant
applications.

I'm not sure if this is the right model for funding research -- regular people
are _completely unable_ to select scientific projects for their merit -- but
combined with a legitimate peer review system, it just might work.

What I'd like to see is Microryza incorporate NIH grant scores, or some other
established peer-review metric. If the public could crowd-fund interesting,
_legitimate_ scientific research, there's definitely a need for the money.

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aheilbut
The disease foundations and other charities are possibly a better model for
this kind of funding, although there may be political and efficiency problems
there too.

I actually really like the kinds of science education and literacy projects
featured on Microryza's homepage, and fun ecology projects involving pandas
and lemurs. That kind of stuff is very underfunded, and the $20k can actually
make those projects happen and make a difference, while getting the broader
public excited about science in general. But it's a mistake to pretend that
this is any sort of solution to problems with NIH funding.

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irollboozers
I strongly disagree with you, in that the big potential solution we offer is
to simultaneously help small foundations and eat their lunch. The whole notion
of someone at a desk stamping papers to identify what research to fund, when
there is just not enough funding to go around anyways, is inefficient and
wasteful. The real power of crowdfunding is that it allows people to really
dictate what they want to care about, and not rely on some proxy to do that
for them.

There are information completeness problems, but those are technical (in my
opinion) and very solvable.

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aheilbut
Using PARP inhibitors to prevent transmission of a BRCA mutation seems like an
exceedingly risky strategy, when pre-implantation diagnosis or selective
termination are effective and have pretty well-defined risks. Messing with DNA
damage detection and repair machinery is probably not something you want to do
in gametes.

Even if this worked in mice, it is difficult for me to imagine how a trial
could even be done to allow it to be approved for human use.

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eksith
BRCA mutation they mention :
<http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/BRCA>

If anyone's feeling disillusioned at this point on the lack of obvious
progress: I'm not entirely sure if the problem at this point is funding as
much as it is the correct allocation. Research branches off to many things,
naturally, and that's how we find cures or even potential cures, but how much
of it is effectively being allocated to promising areas vs just shotgunning
everything? That's why I hope this project does take off.

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ISL
Does anyone have a feel for microryza's near-future plans?

Looking at the grant applications on the first page, there are [5 5 25 4.7 9 6
17.5 10] * $1000 in goals. None of these can support a grad student for a
year, let alone a postdoc.

Are they planning to broaden out into larger-scoped projects, or is the plan
to stay small and get successful with small grants?

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irollboozers
We do have several larger scoped projects in the works. The project sizes have
been kept intentionally small up until now.

~~~
ISL
Thanks! Best 'o luck!

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downandout
It's sort of a sad statement about our society that the Veronica Mars
kickstarter project has raised $4.1 million with time to spare, while all of
the worthy projects on Microryza combined couldn't do it.

Someone needs to make a for-profit movie/violent video game company with the
goal of using the profits to fund this stuff.

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aheilbut
People donate a lot of money to medical research through organizations like
the American Cancer Society and many more specific foundations.

Just because crowdfunding is cool, it doesn't follow that it makes sense as a
funding mechanism for science.

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eksith
Of course, there are other funding sources, but I don't think it _doesn't_
make sense for funding science. The problem is the never ending list of
charlatans that can siphon badly needed funds from legitimate reserach, so a
lot of these need some sort of strict vetting (especially for biological
research) from qualified professionals. Unless they too are volunteering their
services, that's an added cost right there.

