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.
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.
The "bait" is the claim that a patent-less drug will be cheaper when it finally comes into use in the clinic than a patented drug (from your indysci campaign: "Releasing without a patent means the drugs will be cheaper and it will be easier to build on the work to make improved drugs or drug combinations. Releasing without a patent means expanded access to drugs in countries that can't afford extensive licensing and export agreements.")
But you and I both know that is not how drug development works. When you bring in a pharmaceutical company to fund the clinical trials (which are hugely risky) they will demand an upside. The upside will come if they (a) make a derivative molecule that they can patent (b) patent a use of the drug for an indication (c) package the molecule in a way that is patentable -- e.g. with an adjuvant.
The crowdsourcing page on Indysci reads as if the drug will eventually be cheap and readily accessible just because you have not applied for patent protection.
Another point: the indysci page misleads people about what drug patents means by comparing it to open-source software. As an academic researcher, you can work on ANY molecule, no matter its patent status, in an academic research setting. That means you can develop new uses for the molecule, make derivatives, etc. What you really mean is that patented drugs cannot be SOLD by anyone other than the manufacturer.
Typically industrial compound leads are developed in closed, siloed situations, because if you disclose you jeopardize your patent status. Of course, "open sourcing" doesn't guaranteed development in non-siloed environments either (you could just fail to 'git push' on a mistake branch), but it does somewhat eliminate the incentives to do so. Perhaps the wording ("it will be easier to build on the work to make improved drugs or drug combinations") on my attempt to analogize that is bad for being unspecific. Do you have a suggestion on how I might change that on the page to better reflect this concept?
