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Crowdfunding Patent-Free Cancer Drugs

posted by azrael on Tuesday October 28 2014, @07:56PM   
from the drug-patents-shouldn't-exist dept.

AnonTechie writes:

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.

• Misleading summary. TFA explains. Misleading summary. TFA explains. (Score: 3) by MrGuy on Tuesday October 28 2014, @10:02PM

  by MrGuy (1007) on Tuesday October 28 2014, @10:02PM (#110990)

  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.

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• Re:Misleading summary. TFA explains. (Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:59PM

  by frojack (1554) on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:59PM (#111010) Journal

  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.

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