

Open Cures - working around the biggest problem in medical development - reasonattlm
http://www.opencures.org

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reasonattlm
The present state of affairs with respect to regulation of research and
commercial development of biotechnologies in the US leads us into a situation
wherein there are any number of languishing lines of research aimed at
intervening in the aging process. They cannot cost-effectively be commercially
developed by the US-based groups that demonstrated their effectiveness in
animals in the laboratory -- or cannot be developed at all, since the FDA will
not approve treatments for aging, and that has the predictable effect on the
number of investors willing to pony up for the privilege of running into a
brick wall.

A similar dampening effect on development stems from the present state of
intellectual property laws, which are three shades of ridiculous. But that
barrier is less important, I feel, than the FDA's stance on aging and
treatments for aging. One thing at a time.

Outside the US there are a number of developed nations which in which
commercial medical development is less regulated. China for example - and US
citizens of a certain age will no doubt feel sad that we can now point to
modern day China as an example of comparative freedom in human endeavor. Not
sad for the Chinese, but sad for us.Other nations in that part of the world
are similarly more open than the US when it comes to commercial development of
new medicaltechnology: even India, despite its bureaucracy.

When we look to the future of commercial longevity-enhancing medical
technologies - or indeed any cutting edge biotechnology - I think we're
looking at the process of building a bridge between the less restricted parts
of the world and the output of the US research community. That bridge is
forged of medical tourism, venture investment, and a flow of knowledge.
Without it, little will bedeveloped: there must be an outlet for new science
to become new technology, and that outlet is being progressively narrowed in
the US with each passing year.

Now I can't do anything about medical tourism or venture investment, but I can
persuade people to help contribute to the flow of knowledge: to establish a
bridge between potential longevity-enhancing technologies that have been
demonstrated in the laboratory but can never be fully realized in the US, and
developers half a world away who are more free to translate the fruits of
research into clinical application. This is a matter of documentation, of
building relationships, and of pulling out the most interesting items into the
light. Despite this shrinking world, it is still far from the case that
researchers on opposite sides of the world have a good view into what is and
isn't accomplished.

I think that there's a lot that might be done to help this process along,
especially given the fact that we're moving into an age of open biotechnology
- the impetus, as in software development, will be towards openly shared
knowledge and designs, because the economic advantages that confers are
enormous. Accompanying this shift will be a growing community of lab
collectives, semi-professional developers, and hobbyists. They already exist
in the form of the DIYbio community, but that is just the earliest
manifestation of what is to come, more akin to the Homebrew Computer Club of
the 1970s that spawned computing hardware companies and the rampant growth
that followed.

So I have started a volunteer initiative, an open collaboration for everyone
interested in taking the most interesting published longevity science
demonstrated in the laboratory and building a bridge from it to those groups
who might be able to develop it commercially in the near future.

