Crowd-funding is a widely discussed and disputed financing approach these days. It has proven to work in many industries, including the entertainment sector. But what implications will it have for the healthcare industry? Will it have any impact on healthcare at all?
So far, there are only few examples of crowd-funded healthcare ventures. One of them is the Rare Genomics Institute, a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to providing better and faster diagnostics and therapies for rare diseases. They decided for a personalized approach by putting up individual cases of rare disease sufferers on their website and organizing funding for the diagnosis and treatment of the affected patients. Thereby, Rare Genomics Institute provides treatment opportunities for patients who otherwise would not be able to pay their medical bills, as these kind of therapies (and diagnostics) are usually not funded by healthcare providers.
What seems to work as a fundraising approach for individual cases in the US still has to prove its viability in other regions of the world – and in a larger healthcare context. Could expensive drug development eventually be financed by crowd-funding? According to an article in Genetic Engineering News, there is currently not much evidence that biopharmaceutical companies could benefit from crowd-funding, as their financing requirements are significant and long-term oriented. In fact, there are only very few examples of biopharmaceutical companies which have managed to close a financing by crowd-funding, e.g. cancer immune therapy company Urodelia (France). However, the financing volume has not been disclosed. Others, like AMD Therapy (Germany), a fund dedicated to finance the development of novel therapeutics to combat age-related macular degeneration, or Selexel (France), which is developing cancer therapies based on RNA interference, are still raising funds. Interestingly, AMD Therapy aims to raise as much as EUR 60 million by crowd-funding – much more than other biopharma companies in Europe were able to raise by private equity financing during the past 12 months.
At the end of the day, many questions are still unanswered. Will private sponsors continue to be willing to pay a stranger´s medical bills in the long run? Will start-up healthcare companies financed by crowd-funding eventually have to fulfill strict reporting and transparency requirements?
Andreas Sentker in Die ZEIT takes up the issue of rising eco-terrorism in Germany directed against field trials of genetically modified plants. These plants are an easy target as trial sites have to be disclosed to the public in registers following legislation initiated by the former red-green coalition in Germany. While in the past years opponents of genetically modified plants only targeted the plants they dub as “Gen-Dreck”, violence is now also directed against security firms and guards watching the fields. Last week, a masked gang assaulted security guards, looted their mobile phones and destroyed different plants of research projects from the University of Rostock. The plants were carrying genes for the production of biopolymers and for a vaccine against viral diseases.
In Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Hanno Charisius introduces efforts to create artificial leaves mimicking photosynthesis to create hydrogen which can be used as fuel or energy source. Daniel Nocera from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is just using the principle: water molecules are split using electrical current produced by solar cells – an ages-old principle. Noceras new twist, however, is the use of a mix of cobalt and phosphate as a catalyst. The mix is accumulating at the electrodes, but after a while it is crumbling and thereby regenerating. The reaction is not the most effective one, but prototypes are already running for months without efficiency drop. First machines will now be installed in India for tests in realistic conditions; the goal is to meet the daily power demand of an Indian family by using just 4 liters of water and sunlight. Nocera is now trying to combine his catalyst with solar cells to a single device.
Katrin Blawat, also in SZ, in a somewhat pessimistic article deals with the many failures to develop a drug to combat Alzheimer’s disease. Given that there are neither cures nor effective therapies to prevent or delay the onset of AD, she cautions against tests for early diagnosis.
Another negative outlook is given by Werner Bartens in the same paper. Bartens deals with personalized medicine, calling the concept a “set phrase” invented to disguise that personalized medicine is a mere “PR strategy by the pharma industry and stakeholders from academia” invented to lay a smoke screen on the failure to develop new blockbuster drugs. For Bartens, the “niche buster concept” is “science fiction” allowing the pharma industry to obtain approval without any proof of patient benefit. As an example, Bartens interestingly mentions the introduction of personalized cancer drugs of which only a fraction of the patients is benefitting.
In contrast, Ronald D. Gerste in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) writes about how cancer patients have profited from targeted therapies, e.g. in terms of decreasing cancer mortality and improved survival. Gerste features a trial by the MD Anderson Center in Houston/Texas in which 460 cancer patients underwent detailed molecular genetic analysis. Subsequently, they were treated by a matching therapy addressing the most promising molecular mechanism. Without applying any experimental drugs, this procedure increased survival from 9 to 13.4 months on average.
Also in NZZ, Stefan Betschon makes the case for better science communication, introducing an article by Dirk Helbing and Stefano Bialetti on “how to create an innovation accelerator“. They propose to improve the academic publication system by publishing articles ahead of peer review finalization and call for review by crowd sourcing. Rejected publications should also be made public, alongside with comments.
The Economist this week casts doubt on whether the goal to eradicate polio by the end of 2012 can be met. The disease is still endemic in four countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nigeria), however re-emerged in African and Asian countries in recent years. Reasons are political (war, refugees, etc.), socioeconomic (poor sanitation) and medical (vaccines needs cold chain, virus can hide in asymptomatic carriers) factors.
Another article in The Economist deals with epigenetics findings by a German research group from the University of Konstanz. The team found that stress during pregnancy (abuse, violence, famine, death of a relative etc.) can lead to a change in the DNA methylation patterns of the unborn child, e.g. of the gene coding for glucocorticoid receptors which relay signals from stress hormones in the blood to cells of the brain regions controlling behavior. The findings may explain why children of stressed mothers show higher-than-normal rates of psychological and behavioral disorders and may lead to insights about how and when interventions are possible and promising.
Andrew Pollack in the New York Times features discussions on changing the rules for research in human subjects. The US government claims that changes are needed in the light of genomics studies using patients’ DNA samples, the use of the Internet and a growing reliance on studies that take place at many sites at once. Among the proposed changes are adding informed consent rules to donors of blood, DNA or tissue samples and allowing a single institutional review board for multiple-site clinical studies.
And finally, for all of us struggling daily with the touchscreen keyboards of our iPads and iPhones, IBM comes with a solution: a keyboard that morphs to fit an individual’s finger anatomy and typing style. Paul Marks in Wired dug out an IBM patent describing keyboards in which buttons are automatically resized, reshaped and repositioned according to the users typing style.
