Tag: crowdsourcing

Food for Thought: Crowd-funding – A Useful Financing Strategy for Healthcare Companies?

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?

 

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Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

In Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) Martina Lenzen-Schulte this week reports about an oncology symposion in Wiesbaden/Germany that dealt with oncology patients increasingly turning towards alternative medicines – 40 to 70% according to recent estimates. Oncologists now start to notice they cannot ignore patents’ needs and hopes, and therefore a number of clinicians have turned to looking at available studies on complementary medicine to separate the wheat from the chaff. However, it turns out that many of these studies – on mistletoe therapy as well as on dietary recommendations – are insufficient to provide sound evidence.

Werner Bartens in Sueddeutsche Zeitung features a 3,700 patients study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association demonstrating that contrary to common wisdom low salt diets increase the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

In Wirtschaftswoche, Susanne Kutter introduces the Diapat diagnostic test developed by German biotech company Mosaiques DiaPat GmbH that analyses more than 6,000 different peptide and protein molecules in human urine in one run. The test can be used to diagnose and even predict the onset of diseases. It has just been approved by FDA for the diagnosis of renal diseases. Already, the company markets a prostate cancer urine test in Germany. Mosaique’s test, Kutter claims, is but one of the many achievements to come from proteomics. She adds that the tests will have the potential to save the healthcare system billions of Euros.

Haydn Shaughnessy in Forbes states the record of cancer treatment still looks poor, with cancer mortality not improving a lot – as for example compared to heart diseases. Likewise, many preventive measures such as exercise and low fat diets don’t work. Shaughnessy therefore makes the case to support crowdsourcing approaches to develop a cancer cure like Pink Army and Cancer Commons (see akampioneer’s earlier entry on Open Source Principles – a Concept for the Life Sciences?). Also in Forbes, Matthew Herper forecasts that Pfizer will break itself up and spin out companies soon.

Eric Pfanner in New York Times looks at new European ventures to fill a void in world news after so many news organizations are laying off journalists or closing shop. As examples, he introduces Worldcrunch, a web-based start-up translating newspaper articles from around the world into English and Presseurop which translates into other languages, too.

In the New Scientist Jessica Hamzelou writes that people easily distracted might have more grey matter in their brains than focused people. In a separate article, she also features a pacemaker-like, implantable device that can deliver timed doses of medications for a year. Boonsri Dickinson, also in New Scientist, interviews nobelist Eizabeth Blackburn, the co-discoverer of the telomerase enzyme and its role in aging. Blackburn co-founded biotech company Telome Health, which is now starting to sell a test for telomere length. While at present it is sold for research purposes, e.g. to know more about telomer length as markers of aging, the test will be offered to the public through physicians for $200 later this year. Ferris Jabr in New Scientist introduces an approach fastening nanocapsules filled with interleukins to T cells as a way to cure cancer. So far, it seems to work in mice.

And here our favorite quote from Matthew Herper’s blog, who recently mused about whether entrepreneurs share some genetic characteristics, and if so, whether one could invent an antibody to turn someone into an entrepreneur: “‘Entrepreneur Antibody:’ Serious Side Effects Might Include Visual Hallucinations of Venture Capital.”

And finally, Norbert Lossau in Die Welt features a study by LinkedIn into the most common given names of CEOs, finding that in Germany they are Wolfgang, Christoph and Michael. In France, Gilles is number one, while it is Charles in the UK, Ray in Canada, Guido in Italy and Howard in the US. Marketing people often have short names like Chip, Todd or Trey, while engineers seem to have much longer give names. So think twice before naming your next newborn!