
San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug - udibai
http://timesofsandiego.com/tech/2014/09/20/san-diego-researcher-crowdfunding-patent-free-cancer-drug/
======
tokenadult
Well of course everyone wishes well to anyone pursuing a promising avenue of
research in treating cancer, but what I see here is an online news site with a
tiny reporting staff[1] recycling what is plainly a press release with an
included video as part of the press release. A press release is how people go
about raising crowdfunding, of course, but the role of press releases in the
science news cycle[2] is more to hype a speculative idea that may not work
than to report on what is known for sure.

The researcher who is profiled (through his own press release) in the article
kindly submitted here appears to have written in 2010 a caution about
speculative research. "Ultimately, every cross-disciplinary research niche
must achieve a level of maturity. We would characterize maturity as having two
defining aspects: First, a respectable level of reproducibility is required,
and clear operating procedures using methods accepted by the research
community. Secondly, enough repeated experiments have been conducted that
broader meta-analyses can be conducted to glean additional or unexpected
information about the system. These two aspects, combined, suggest ability and
need to begin a process of standardization so that comparisons may be made to
assess quality of research, and to bolster the strength of peer review.
Ultimately, standardization opens up the avenue for practical engineering."[3]
That sounds about right. If we can find replicable results with this approach,
then we have something to talk about.

[1] [http://timesofsandiego.com/staff/](http://timesofsandiego.com/staff/)

[http://timesofsandiego.com/about/](http://timesofsandiego.com/about/)

[2]
[http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174)

[3] Yonemoto, I. T. and Tippmann, E. M. (2010), The juggernauts of biology.
Bioessays, 32: 314–321. doi: 10.1002/bies.200900142

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.200900142/ab...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.200900142/abstract)

~~~
dnautics
Hi! I'm running the crowdfunding and I'm the first person to say that there
are a ton of ways that this might not work. It's still early-stage
preclinicals (although the results obtained so far are in range of common
drugs like taxol). Arguably more risky is the idea of trying to develop a drug
without patents.

I guess personally I would consider this to be less of a 'science news cycle'
than a 'desperate plea for funding', considering that there are no new results
reported in the article.

~~~
tokenadult
A pleasure to make your acquaintance. I gather from the Hacker News profile
you have that you are indeed the same person as the person profiled in the
article kindly submitted here. (You would have replied just before I posted a
second paragraph to my comment, quoting an earlier paper that I think must be
your co-authored paper.) How did the earlier phases of research go?

~~~
dnautics
Ah, yes, the Juggernauts of Biology. That was a fun article to write. Indeed,
the professor we're critiquing (and also praising) was on my committee, and I
had a copy of an early draft of the Juggernauts paper literally in my back
pocket during my thesis defense [0].

That research is somewhat unrelated to what I'm doing - the more relevant
paper is this (happily open access thanks to the NIH)
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3376188/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3376188/):
The molecule demonstrates great results - single digit nanomolar IC50s
(somewhere between taxol and paclitaxel-level strength). And also mitigated
cardiotoxicity, which was the major concern preventing continuation of
preclinical experiments in the parent compound.

Briefly back to the topic of (the typical scientific) press releases, they
have always been a strange animal, authored by nonscientist PR agents hired by
the institution, bragging about some achievement, without directly asking for
funds - in the case of universities possibly indirectly suggesting to alumni
that their donations are going for good and in the case of institutions like
NASA, reassuring the public that their taxpayer dollars are well-spent.

[0] so this was an option for me.
[http://xkcd.com/1403/](http://xkcd.com/1403/)

~~~
arjie
Please update your profile's link to Project Marilyn. I almost skipped away
and forgot about the whole thing when I saw that you weren't accepting
donations. However, you _are_ accepting donations, just at a different page.

Also, I donated some BTC and then felt like increasing it but browsers I use
are now reporting coinbase in a redirect loop. You're losing money here, man.

~~~
dnautics
oh wow, THANK you. I had made that page invisible, and was wondering how
people were being redirected to a page where they could be put on the mailing
list... Gah.

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ig1
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_development)
has details for those interested)

Crowdfunding at those sort of levels just isn't feasible yet.

~~~
dnautics
That's like saying it takes 7 billion to make a company that competes with
facebook, and you'll never get 7 billion series A funding. Trivially true, but
to compete with facebook is a process, and not all stages of a process use the
same funding mechanisms.

~~~
vvvv
Would you like to sign up for a buggy minimum viable drug treatment?

~~~
grecy
If I had terminal cancer, absolutely!

~~~
dubcanada
I'm with this guy, if I have terminal cancer. I'll try a remedy made from dirt
if it has a chance. I mean what's to lose, at that point my body becomes a
free testing lab.

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rgejman
We already have crowd funding for science. We do it as a whole society when we
fund the various grant-giving agencies in this country. I cannot emphasize how
bad of an idea it is to take funding decisions away from professional
scientists and place them in the hands of untrained individuals, no matter how
enthusiastic they may be nor how much money they are willing to throw away.

~~~
exratione
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 proof of concept you are not getting
funded, and the institutions don't really care about where the starting point
of the pipeline actually comes from. Every lab scrapes out funding from the
corners of existing grants and petitions patrons to conduct what is arguably
their most important work, which is to say the actual work of taking risks and
creating new things.

What most people call research grants are nothing of the sort. They are
development grants. The research already happened, and it was paid for by
bootstrapped philanthropy.

~~~
skosuri
> the majority of useful early stage research is funded by philanthropy

Really? Is there a source for this?

~~~
danielweber
"Early stage research" is such a wacky term you haven't a hope of getting that
nailed down.

If you sit down like a serious person and look at a well-defined question,
like "where do drugs that end up being administered to patients start their
existence?", you get

58% from pharmaceutical companies.

18% from biotech companies.

16% from universities, transferred to biotech.

8% from universities, transferred to pharma.

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/11/04/where_drugs_...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/11/04/where_drugs_come_from_the_numbers.php)

------
Gatsky
I think the negative comments on here have got it upside down. I research and
treat cancer, and I think this is great. The fact that it costs billions to
develop a drug is why we should support novel pathways of organising drug
development, rather than disparaging it.

It may not really be obvious from the outside, but there is a coming crisis in
that we won't as a society be able to afford new cancer drugs. It is regularly
reported that new drugs which are typically priced around US$120k per year
(for multiple years in some cases) are not cost effective. Case in point:
crizotonib. This is a drug that works very well at shrinking tumours and
controlling disease in incurable lung cancer. It is targeted - it only works
if your tumour has a particular gene fusion, which occurs in about 4% of lung
cancer patients. It is well tolerated compared to chemotherapy. It's the kind
of personalised medicine we are hoping to achieve more broadly in the future.
And the way it is priced isn't cost effective [1].

I can guarantee you that the coming surge in immunotherapies will be
exorbitantly priced. And these are drugs we will be giving not to 4% of cancer
patients, but > 50% of advanced cancer patients in a given tumour type.

These problems are even worse in countries where the government pays for
drugs, because they are far more restricted in what they can afford. Patients
just end up missing out. And if you think having cancer is bad enough, knowing
there is a drug that might help and not being able to afford it is just heart
breaking.

So good luck to them, I hope they can draw some money away from nonsense like
crowd funding potato salad.

[1]
[http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/early/2014/02/24/JCO.2013.53...](http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/early/2014/02/24/JCO.2013.53.1186.abstract)

------
protonfish
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.

~~~
31reasons
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 ?

~~~
donpdonp
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.

------
EGreg
What we should really do is have an open source movement in Drugs:

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93)

~~~
leovan
you are right and judging from the regressive and reactionary fears this
project is generating from the "professionals" the man is onto something.

good luck doc, you have everything it takes to start moving history in the
right direction, right now.

------
brooklynjam
Many years ago, I worked in a lab where I synthesized a variant of Interferon
using solid phase peptide synthesis. It was all manual work, using pretty
basic materials. It's just a peptide after all.

I finished at 11 PM. Cleaned it up, walked across the street to probably one
of the world's most respected Cancer Hospitals. Gave it to the MD on staff, he
said we'll try it now. Right now.

A lot of things go on when people are at life and death cross roads. Lots of
things out of the mainstream. When all hope is gone, sometimes miracles can
happen.

~~~
RankingMember
Did you hear back from him? How'd it work?

------
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.

~~~
korzun
Only HN somebody will compare cancer drugs to Pebble.

~~~
tmuir
Compare, contrast, whats the difference?

~~~
aangjie
I would say, contrast focuses only on the difference between the entities
being contrasted, while compare can mean, you also focus on the similarities.
Not sure, how you use the words, though.

~~~
tmuir
It was a sarcastic remark. My original comment's gist was that all of the
naysayers, at least with respect to the amount of funding required, are basing
their analysis on a faulty assumption. So far, we've seen a very narrow niche
of people, with very specific interests, fund successful kickstarters on the
order of $1,000,000 to $10,000,000. In _contrast_, the demographic of people
that would likely be interested in funding cancer research is potentially
1,000 to 10,000 times larger than the 18-35 year old, white American male STEM
worker with disposable income and a poor understanding of the realities of
electronics manufacturing demographic.

Thus, $1,000,000,000 is not unreasonable at all.

~~~
aangjie
My Bad. Though, the original comment "compare cancer with Pebble" didn't
deserve a reply. Just trolling, you're comparing funding campaign building
both, not the experiences of both.

------
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.

