Not sure what the idea is here. Going by cold statistics, this will cost orders of magnitude more than they are seeking from crowd funding. And even then, with overwhelming likelihood, it will fail in clinical trials.
that is total R&D cost divided by successful drugs. So think, a lot of failed candidates, dumb ideas, and since pharma is siloed and closed, duplicated effort between different companies' skunk works. Also, regulatory burden for things that are lifestyle drugs (think: viagra) is understandably higher than a chemotherapeutic.
The actual cost of getting a chemotherapeutic developed is about 1-2 million in preclinical, and 12-20 million through clinical. Counting lots of inefficiencies, and, as I discuss downthread, we're stacking the deck in our favor.
Indeed, though your broader point is correct, clinical is more expensive and I think ultimately that should be done by a for-profit entity. But crowdfunding can nudge things in that direction by completing the preclinical.
Of course it's including the failures, we don't know whether your candidate will succeed. I'm reasoning in terms of the expectation value of the a success: the cost of one project such as yours, divided by the probability of it creating a useful drug.
"The actual cost of getting a chemotherapeutic developed is about 1-2 million in preclinical, and 12-20 million through clinical. Counting lots of inefficiencies, and, as I discuss downthread, we're stacking the deck in our favor."
That's only part of the equation. What's the probability that it fails preclinical or clinical trials? What are the historical success rates for chemotherapeutics? (Serious question)
edit: I've Googled up what I think is a relevant statistic? According to this source, of cancer drug candidates which completed US clinical trials between 2004-2011, 6.7% of the ones which entered phase I ended up as approved drugs (the rest failing out). Apparently this is much worse than non-cancer drugs, which have a 12.1% rate.
This may be off-topic but I always wondered where all the billions raised by charities for cancer research end up. It has to be one of the top money earning charitable causes out there.
Are we really just donating money and time to people who end up over-charging us for pharmaceuticals and procedures? I'm not saying we are but I scratch my head when I hear about the astronomical cost of cancer treatment.
A significant portion is doled out in 5-7 figure grants to research laboratories for a particular research project with a 2-5 year time-horizon. The projects are proposed by a PI (a researcher), and conducted by students, postdocs, or other scientists. The money goes directly to equipment, materials and sometimes salaries or stipends in order to undertake the particular research project. The materials can be anything from tissue-culture materials, to DNA sequencing, to microscopy equipment, to anything else required to achieve the proposed research goal. And all of that is pricy.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/10/the-tru...
Not sure what the idea is here. Going by cold statistics, this will cost orders of magnitude more than they are seeking from crowd funding. And even then, with overwhelming likelihood, it will fail in clinical trials.