Paul Howard in Forbes: “tarting you own band, writing your first novel, or re-publishing your favorite ‘80s tabletop RPG are all cool goals. You can do them all on Kickstarter. What would be cooler?
How about funding a virtual biotech company with one goal: Saving or extending the life of a cancer patient who doesn’t respond to “standard of care” treatments….
The Cancer Commons approach – a distributed framework for empowering patients and learning from every patient/treatment combination – breaks down traditional distinctions between clinical trials and patient treatment in the “real world.” Instead of developing treatments in a lab and then testing them on randomized patients in clinical trials (designed to benefit future patients), researchers would apply the latest scientific knowledge and tools to help each patient achieve the best possible outcome today based on what we know – or think we can predict – about a molecular subtype of cancer….
We’ll need more than money to power a Kickstarter-for-cancer movement. We’ll need to encourage companies – from Big Pharma to “small” biotechs – to participate in distributed, Bayesian trials where new biomarkers or combinations of biomarkers are tested in patients with particular molecular profiles. And the FDA is going to have to be convinced that the system is going to generate high quality data that benefits patients, not sell them snake-oil cures.
In return for companies making their compound libraries and experimental drugs available for the “virtual biotechs” launched by cancer patients and their families, there should be a regulatory path established to take the most promising drugs and drug combinations to market.”
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