6 ms·

San Diego Researcher Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drug

198 points by udibai 12y ago

tokenadult 12y ago
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/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.200900142/ab...
- dnautics 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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.
rgejman 12y ago
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.
- dnautics 12y ago
  Here is a quote that my experience in science has caused me to resonate with. "I think there's been a Gresham's Law in science funding in this country, as the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast." - Peter Thiel [0] [0]http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_technology_entrepreneur_and_investor/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_tec...
  - rgejman 12y ago
    There are many problems with the institutions in this country that give grants. However, crowdsourcing is not the answer. Nor is baiting people by offering them the promise of a "patent free" cancer drug. Full-term drug development, including clinical trials reaches into the billions of dollars. You're never going to crowdsource that. So even if your drug is wildly successful and nontoxic (of which the chances are tiny given that you have not yet done animal studies), you will to partner with a pharma comnpany to bankroll the rest of its development.
    - dnautics 12y ago
      how is that a bait? I'm pretty damn serious about that. Anyone who knows me knows that I have been a very fervent anti-patent person for years now. It's caused problems in places that I have worked. I think it's correct to say that I am not going to crowdfund the entire drug development. Accordingly, that is not the plan. My vision is that the first stage (well second, really) is crowdfunded to show that there is broad interest in the idea in society, to raise some amount of funding outside of institutional granters, and achieve a productive result showing that indysci (and I) are not totally incompetent buffoons. The completion of preclinicals (which typically ranges in the single-to-double-digit millions) would probably best come from institutional nonprofit granters, and running clinicals should come from the for-profit (probably generic) pharma that is seeking to capitalize on it. But I'm open-minded to other ideas.
ig1 12y ago
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.
- jonlucc 12y ago
  Worse, I fear that cancer patients and their loved ones will get overly enthusiastic about this. Then, when they donate tons of money and it fails, they are out money, time, and a drug. This is the reason pharmaceutical companies are cautious about contacting patient advocacy groups.
  - dnautics 12y ago
    Good point. This is something i wrestled with. It's very likely this will fail (for both social and scientific reasons). At the very least though if it fails for scientific reasons, since experiments will be openly disclosed (unlike the siloed process at pharma r&d) - we will learn something - even if that something is "don't try making this drug again".
    - rgoddard 12y ago
      If I am donating to a charity which funnels money to research, how is this all that different? I think you can tap into a similar set of population and motivations for the donations. One of the upsides with this sort of approach is that you have a great opportunity to involve the donors in the overall process. The experiment can be used to provide a view into the nitty gritty of the scientific process and more specifically drug research. Of course to do this well will take a significant effort to communicate everything effectively. On the other hand, as you mentioned, you don't want to create false hope. To mitigate this you would want to work on managing expectations on the potential results and consequences of those results are. Either way you should be able to gather useful information/experience on both the scientific experiment and the social experiment.
protonfish 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- mikeryan 12y ago
  Because the profits from those drugs can be used to fund new drug therapies as well. Same reason as private companies. I'd prefer the drugs are made available to anyone who needs them at a reasonable rate (maybe a sliding scale based on income?) then making those discoveries public domain.
- rhino369 12y ago
  From what I understand, public money does not go to individual drug research, but goes towards more basic and foundational research. Drugs are built on top of the foundational knowledge, but the patents for those drugs do not then cover the foundational knowledge. For example, if public research discovers what triggers cancer cells to multiply, drug companies will scramble to make drugs to prevent it. But the drug company cannot just patent the knowledge about the trigger. If a second drug company finds a second way to prevent the trigger, they can make it, no problem. Maybe I'm just not aware of direct public funding to drug companies.
EGreg 12y ago
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
- dnautics 12y ago
  I agree with this greatly! It will take time, though.
- leovan 12y ago
  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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
anonbanker 12y ago
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.
tmuir 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Only HN somebody will compare cancer drugs to Pebble.
  - tmuir 12y ago
    Compare, contrast, whats the difference?
    - aangjie 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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.
Gatsky 12y ago
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.2013.53.1186.abstract http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/early/2014/02/24/JCO.2013.53...
brooklynjam 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Did you hear back from him? How'd it work?

198 points by udibai 12y ago

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/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.200900142/ab...

dnautics 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.

rgejman 12y ago

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.

dnautics 12y ago
Here is a quote that my experience in science has caused me to resonate with. "I think there's been a Gresham's Law in science funding in this country, as the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast." - Peter Thiel [0] [0]http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_technology_entrepreneur_and_investor/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_tec...
- rgejman 12y ago
  There are many problems with the institutions in this country that give grants. However, crowdsourcing is not the answer. Nor is baiting people by offering them the promise of a "patent free" cancer drug. Full-term drug development, including clinical trials reaches into the billions of dollars. You're never going to crowdsource that. So even if your drug is wildly successful and nontoxic (of which the chances are tiny given that you have not yet done animal studies), you will to partner with a pharma comnpany to bankroll the rest of its development.
  - dnautics 12y ago
    how is that a bait? I'm pretty damn serious about that. Anyone who knows me knows that I have been a very fervent anti-patent person for years now. It's caused problems in places that I have worked. I think it's correct to say that I am not going to crowdfund the entire drug development. Accordingly, that is not the plan. My vision is that the first stage (well second, really) is crowdfunded to show that there is broad interest in the idea in society, to raise some amount of funding outside of institutional granters, and achieve a productive result showing that indysci (and I) are not totally incompetent buffoons. The completion of preclinicals (which typically ranges in the single-to-double-digit millions) would probably best come from institutional nonprofit granters, and running clinicals should come from the for-profit (probably generic) pharma that is seeking to capitalize on it. But I'm open-minded to other ideas.

ig1 12y ago

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.

jonlucc 12y ago
Worse, I fear that cancer patients and their loved ones will get overly enthusiastic about this. Then, when they donate tons of money and it fails, they are out money, time, and a drug. This is the reason pharmaceutical companies are cautious about contacting patient advocacy groups.
- dnautics 12y ago
  Good point. This is something i wrestled with. It's very likely this will fail (for both social and scientific reasons). At the very least though if it fails for scientific reasons, since experiments will be openly disclosed (unlike the siloed process at pharma r&d) - we will learn something - even if that something is "don't try making this drug again".
  - rgoddard 12y ago
    If I am donating to a charity which funnels money to research, how is this all that different? I think you can tap into a similar set of population and motivations for the donations. One of the upsides with this sort of approach is that you have a great opportunity to involve the donors in the overall process. The experiment can be used to provide a view into the nitty gritty of the scientific process and more specifically drug research. Of course to do this well will take a significant effort to communicate everything effectively. On the other hand, as you mentioned, you don't want to create false hope. To mitigate this you would want to work on managing expectations on the potential results and consequences of those results are. Either way you should be able to gather useful information/experience on both the scientific experiment and the social experiment.

protonfish 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mikeryan 12y ago
Because the profits from those drugs can be used to fund new drug therapies as well. Same reason as private companies. I'd prefer the drugs are made available to anyone who needs them at a reasonable rate (maybe a sliding scale based on income?) then making those discoveries public domain.
rhino369 12y ago
From what I understand, public money does not go to individual drug research, but goes towards more basic and foundational research. Drugs are built on top of the foundational knowledge, but the patents for those drugs do not then cover the foundational knowledge. For example, if public research discovers what triggers cancer cells to multiply, drug companies will scramble to make drugs to prevent it. But the drug company cannot just patent the knowledge about the trigger. If a second drug company finds a second way to prevent the trigger, they can make it, no problem. Maybe I'm just not aware of direct public funding to drug companies.

EGreg 12y ago

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

dnautics 12y ago
I agree with this greatly! It will take time, though.
leovan 12y ago
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.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

anonbanker 12y ago

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.

tmuir 12y ago

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 12y ago
Only HN somebody will compare cancer drugs to Pebble.
- tmuir 12y ago
  Compare, contrast, whats the difference?
  - aangjie 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.

Gatsky 12y ago

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.2013.53.1186.abstract http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/early/2014/02/24/JCO.2013.53...

brooklynjam 12y ago

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 12y ago
Did you hear back from him? How'd it work?