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Chemist and “semi-recreational” codemonkey Isaac Yonemoto is running a crowdfunding campaign called Project Marilyn to create open sourced, patent-free cancer drugs.
Yonemoto proposes a $75,000 stretch goal to fund an experiment he hopes will prove we can use a compound sequenced from microscopic bug cultures to treat cancer.
It’s a plan that could liberate pharmaceuticals and dramatically lower the cost of anticancer medicine. The global market for these drugs surpassed $1 trillion this year. The average monthly cost of a brand-name cancer drug in the U.S. is about $10,000, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.
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Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drugs
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Now KEN and BARBIE are PERMANENTLY ADDICTED to MIND-ALTERING DRUGS ...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by paulej72 on Tuesday October 28 2014, @08:39PM
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Tuesday October 28 2014, @08:43PM
Part of the problem is that big pharma tend not to research anything they can't patent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday October 28 2014, @08:47PM
Well, TFA does say the work was started long ago and they already have identified a candidate drug. Still, I would not fund this because there is no indication they are near human trials. I'd also be worried that even if the drug is successful, past stakeholders such as the University of Maryland would come out of the woodwork to claim intellectual property rights over the vaccine. Seems to me Yonemoto has good intentions but is trying to waive IP rights to something that is not entirely his own.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday October 29 2014, @05:30PM
Well, if they didn't patent before publishing, then they have no legal claim to the previous work. And if they did patent, then those patents expired years ago, and they no longer have legal claim to the work. I don't see that he's trying to waive anyone else's IP rights at all - any possible rights no longer exist. As for the work not being entirely his own - I challenge you to find any example of an intellectual work that's entirely one person's. Anything, anywhere, anywhen - it's all incremental improvements built upon the work done by previous generations. Even really revolutionary stuff like jazz or Relativity was built on the shoulders of the giants who came before.
The idea that a person can climb the ladder of human knowledge, and then claim "*I* made this rung, and nobody else can step on it without my permission" is preposterous on the face of it - we only permit such claims, and only for a limited duration, in order to encourage the rung-builders to be more prolific. And the effectiveness of such incentives has long been contested: some of the greatest periods of innovation in history have been in times and places where patents did not exist.
(Score: 3) by MrGuy on Tuesday October 28 2014, @10:02PM
This is not a project to, from scratch, research a wide variety of potential new anti-cancer drugs. Nor is it to produce more than one drug.
There is an existing compound (9DS) that shows promise as a potential anti-cancer drug. That compound is not patent encumbered. The specific funding sought is to conduct a very specific type of study, which is a necessary precursor to bringing the potential drug through to a clinical trial. They have a specific budget for how they want to conduct this specific study.
Should this study show the expected promise, there will then need to be actual clinical trials. This isn't the end of the road.
The big win is that, if they can conduct this research and are successful, then they can potentially talk about getting funding for doing the actual clinical trials that will (potentially) bring this specific (non-patent-encumbered) drug to market.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:59PM
talk about getting funding for doing the actual clinical trials that will (potentially) bring this specific (non-patent-encumbered) drug to market.
And there's the rub.
Second or third rate drug companies might produce it, just as they do Aspirin, but nobody is going to make a huge investment in this when some factory in India can take their market away two weeks after they launch.
I know a researcher in breast cancer on the East coast who has the same problem. A drug in hand that they are very confident of, but, because it is naturally produced in the body under certain conditions, there are no interested producers to fund the trials.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.