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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.

• Wrong culture (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29 2014, @01:24PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29 2014, @01:24PM (#111131)

  I think this effort and money are better spent performing the work in a non-USian country. I cannot imagine if this was remotely successful that the American culture would allow this to be patent-free and affordable for the masses. USian corporations (e.g., universities) will just claim in court blah blah blah and his efforts will be for naught. Any useful research he produces will be used by big corporations to sell very expensive drugs. Our only hope might be for him to leak the data to nations who value human lives over corporate (e.g., university) profit. I wish him luck, but I think he misunderstands the size of the toes he's potentially stepping on.