sharon sanders
Editor-in-Chief & President
Crowdfunding A Patent-Free Drug For Treating Cancer
from the here's-how-it's-done dept
Here on Techdirt we've been pretty scathing about the way that Big Pharma develops drugs -- often poorly -- and then uses patent monopolies to keep prices so high that only rich Westerners can afford them. Of course, it's easy to complain about the flaws of the current approach, but are there any alternatives? We've already covered one -- using prizes - and now Carl Levinson points us to another potentially powerful approach: crowdsourcing. It's already been adopted by 'Project Marilyn' to develop a patent-free anti-cancer drug:
The campaign will fund a xenograft experiment, which is the next step in developing the promising anti-cancer compound "9DS". This experiment needs to be completed before 9DS can move on to clinical trials.
Here are some more details of both the drug and the project:
The drug candidate 9DS was developed at the University of Maryland. The last work done on the drug showed that it had activity against cancer competitive with leading cancer drugs such as taxol. Moreover, 9DS is also likely to have lower side effects than most chemotherapies, since a related compound, SJG-136, seems to have low side effects in early clinical trials.
more...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...unding-patent-free-drug-treating-cancer.shtml
from the here's-how-it's-done dept
Here on Techdirt we've been pretty scathing about the way that Big Pharma develops drugs -- often poorly -- and then uses patent monopolies to keep prices so high that only rich Westerners can afford them. Of course, it's easy to complain about the flaws of the current approach, but are there any alternatives? We've already covered one -- using prizes - and now Carl Levinson points us to another potentially powerful approach: crowdsourcing. It's already been adopted by 'Project Marilyn' to develop a patent-free anti-cancer drug:
The campaign will fund a xenograft experiment, which is the next step in developing the promising anti-cancer compound "9DS". This experiment needs to be completed before 9DS can move on to clinical trials.
Here are some more details of both the drug and the project:
The drug candidate 9DS was developed at the University of Maryland. The last work done on the drug showed that it had activity against cancer competitive with leading cancer drugs such as taxol. Moreover, 9DS is also likely to have lower side effects than most chemotherapies, since a related compound, SJG-136, seems to have low side effects in early clinical trials.
more...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...unding-patent-free-drug-treating-cancer.shtml