"Open Source" Drug Development Company Launched

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"Open Source" Drug Development Company Launched

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 23, 2012 @03:01PM from the wisdom-of-the-drugged-crowd dept.

First time accepted submitter awjourn writes "During his years working in pharma R&D, Tomasz Sablinski was frustrated by the industry's need for secrecy and its utter inability to design patient-friendly drug trials. So he founded Transparency Life Sciences, a company that's developing three drugs based on input from patients and physicians, who log onto the company's site and voice their opinions about how drugs should be designed and tested."

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Careful... by pspahn · 2012-02-23 15:09 · Score: 3, Insightful

Open sourcing things like education, arts, and soft/hardware is one thing. Messing with the pharmaceutical companies is entirely another.
I wish them luck.

--
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
1. Re:Careful... by Rich0 · 2012-02-23 15:29 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Nobody is going to sue them. They'll do just fine when it is just a few low-paid workers working on concepts - that is the cheap part and it is done by all kinds of start-ups/etc.
  Eventually they'll get all excited that they have the next cure for cancer and there will be newspaper articles about how it kills cancer cells in a test tube. That probably happens every other week in some lab somewhere across the country. The big question is - does it work in people, and does it have some nasty side-effect? This is a relatively simple question to answer - you just need to kill a few hundred lab rats first (hmm, suddenly operation "Transparency" is either keeping very quiet about this or they're going to be protested into oblivion). Then, if the lab rats do reasonably well you start doing clinical trials.
  How do clinical trials work? Simply, you throw a lot of money at a lot of doctors to convince them to take the time to suggest to their patients that the drug might help them. Some doctors will follow the protocol and collect good data. Other doctors will try to get anybody then can find to take the drug whether or not they're a good candidate per the protocol and collect extra fees, and they'll add lots of noise to your data. After you repeat this a few thousand times you'll have run through tens of millions of dollars - mostly spent on getting doctors to participate (most of the patients don't get much of anything), and to some extent on clinical testing (though you don't have to pay lab techs nearly as much as independent doctors.
  When that's all done the answer will come back that it doesn't work at all, and you've just wasted $20M. So, you start all over again and burn through another $20M, and then do that another 5-10X until you get lucky. That is assuming somebody keeps dishing out that kind of cash for you to operate. Once you get through all that you can go ahead and put your drug on the market. At that point anybody who gets the sniffles when they take it will probably try to sue you, but assuming you're charging $5/pill you can probably still make a good profit. Of course, then everybody calls you a sellout and talks about how cheap drugs are to make and that some Indian company can do it for 5 cents a pill. Naturally the Indian company didn't fork out $20M 10X over 5-7 years trying to get it right, so its expense base is way lower. Or, you can sell it cheap if the people who forked over the original $200M didn't care to make a profit. More power to them if they can find that kind of money - I think it is probably the future of drug development (though likely with governments paying the bill - right now they almost never pay for trials since they aren't really all that innovative).
  Lots of companies discover drugs - including some start-ups that have grown into major companies in the last 15 years. The reason nobody has come out with a brand new medication that costs the same as Tylenol isn't because there is some grand conspiracy. The problem is that the success rate is low, and the cost of clinical trials is very high.
  I don't really see the comparison with open source software. It sounds like they're taking suggestions, which is nice, but it isn't like anybody can just whip up some pills in their garage, test them out on homeless people, and report in if they work OK.
2. Re:Careful... by ozmanjusri · 2012-02-23 15:48 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Nobody is going to sue them.
  
  Suing will be the least of their problems.
  They'll be subject to huge FUD and smear campaigns from the get go, have supply and distribution channels blocked, approvals refused and so on ad nauseum.
  It's a shame, but efforts like this to open up our society scare the hell out of governemnt and business interests.
  
  --
  "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
3. Re:Careful... by Charliemopps · 2012-02-23 16:50 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  "Or, you can sell it cheap if the people who forked over the original $200M didn't care to make a profit."
  GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals makes over $8 billion dollars a year on 1 drug alone... Advair.
  It's $450 for a 30day supply.
  Their patent has run out, but they either sue or bribe the FDA into scuttling any efforts of anyone that attempts to make a generic.
  Of course, there's a generic in India that sells for $30/month
  I literally can not breath without taking this.
  
  So, I agree... they should make a profit. I don't even want the drug to be "cheap"
  But is $8 billion a year enough profit? Would it hurt them if it were only... I dunno... 2 Billion?
  And I don't want it for free... but $450? Really? Could be do it for $100? I don't need the fancy box it comes in... or to hear all those ads... the dispenser is right out of startrek. Dumb it down a bit. I just want to be able to afford to breath again.
  
  You're already Rich as fuck GlaxoSmithKline. You've got swimming pools full of money. Please... price your drug back down out of the "Holy fucking shit" range so I can breath again... or at least let someone else do it for you.
4. Re:Careful... by jenningsthecat · 2012-02-23 17:18 · Score: 2
  
  GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals makes over $8 billion dollars a year on 1 drug alone... Advair. It's $450 for a 30day supply.
  From this, it's REALLY obvious that they're simply charging whatever they can get away with. I live in Canada, and I pay $170, including the dispensing fee, for a 120-dose Advair 25/250 inhaler. (I don't like the disk). I don't have a benefits plan, so the price I pay is the full shot, yet it's well under half of what you pay. Raping and pillaging, anyone? Is it any wonder that Big Pharma is universally despised?
  
  --
  'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
5. Re:Careful... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-23 17:21 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  the current drug development systems are horribly inefficient , they resemble what programmers would conceder "brute force" methods, try almost everything you can see what has an effect and go from there. At each step were you might want to improve the drug only use understanding based approaches only if all else fails. This used to work much better, the diseases that we where trying to treat where simpler and our understanding worse, but as modern technology advances this methodology becomes more wastefull. Part of the problem is that understanding how a drug works gives your rivals a way of making alternatives so is unattractive unless you have no other option, but there is a lot of inertia involved as well. This is not their only problem but it is a massive issue and they should be able to save a lot of time and money by starting from understanding instead.
6. Re:Careful... by pepty · 2012-02-23 20:30 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Over the past ~fifteen years the big pharma companies spent 4 to 12 billion dollars on R and D per approved drug.
  No, that does not include marketing; Pharma companies would much rather have their marketing dollars recognized as such every quarter, they're not going to bury that budget in research.
  Prices are set at absolutely the highest prices the market will bear, but that's true in pretty much every market, even ones without giant sunk costs.
  The marketing more than pays for itself in higher sales; they wouldn't do it otherwise. The big cash sink for Pharma companies is stock buybacks: over the past decade their research efforts have failed so often that they've basically admitted that buying their own stock is a better way for them to compensate their CEOs, er, I mean protect shareholder value.
  The main difference between pharma and every other business is just that business as usual becomes absolutely asinine when people's health is involved.
"Patients and Physicians" by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-23 15:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

Let's leave drug design to the chemists and biologists who are actually qualified to do such work. I want to drive over bridges designed by civil engineers, not drivers and city planners.
1. Re:"Patients and Physicians" by Rich0 · 2012-02-23 15:35 · Score: 2
  
  Asking doctors and patients what kinds of drugs they'd like to have isn't a bad idea - pharmaceutical companies do it all the time, and perhaps not as often as they should. However, good marketing can't change the state of technology. If you surveyed everybody in my neighborhood I'm sure that a $1000 flying car would be right at the top of everybody's list. You'd waste a great deal of money if you tried to actually invent one, because the technology just isn't there yet.
  It isn't like nobody knows what the big disease targets are today. The problem is that nobody knows how to fix them, or if they have ideas they haven't yet found a drug that actually works in practice. That's a really expensive process.
  If somebody figured out today that inhibiting some particular protein interaction would make us live to the age of 200, it would probably be 15 years and a few hundred million dollars before somebody got it right. It probably would only take weeks before somebody was inhibiting that interaction in a test tube, but it would take a lot of trial and error and tens of thousands of trial patients to figure out which molecule works in people and doesn't eat away their heart valves or whatever.
Re:Hallelujah by Rich0 · 2012-02-23 15:39 · Score: 2

An idea whose time as come. What a shame no one thought of it, or could make a credible beginning of it, sooner.
Lots of people have thought of it - I remember seeing comments on this on Slashdot years ago.
The beginning doesn't really matter that much - the question is how does it end. Unless somebody gives this company a ton of charity money (perhaps tens to hundreds of millions depending on luck) to actually pursue their work then they'll either collapse without actually coming out with a proven drug, or they'll have to sell out to a private investor in any number of ways, in which case the drug that does come out will cost $5/pill like everything else.
They're just doing the easy stuff right now - the kind of stuff happening in every University and start-up and established pharma company across the country. How many articles have you seen in the last 20 years about some idea that scientists think could cure some major disease? How many panned out remotely as well as was hoped, and how many were cheap for the first 20 years? Curing cancer in a test tube is easy.
There is a precedent for such groups by postglock · 2012-02-23 15:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

Despite the claims on their website that "Transparency Life Sciences is the world’s first drug development company based on open innovation", the Open Source Drug Discovery group (based in India) has been doing this for over three years now, focusing on tuberculosis. I'm also aware of "Open Source Drug Discovery for Malaria".
Another Malthusian Failure by Okian+Warrior · 2012-02-23 15:50 · Score: 4, Insightful

When that's all done the answer will come back that it doesn't work at all, and you've just wasted $20M. So, you start all over again and burn through another $20M, and then do that another 5-10X until you get lucky.
Yep. It definitely won't work, because we know that things never change and there's no other possible way that things can be done. You probably didn't think Wikipedia was a good idea either.
It's obvious that the current system is flawed, and easily argued that the system is ineffective. We need other options.
You're unwilling to try new approaches, and you don't think anything will come of it. Fine, you're welcome to your opinion.
But we need change. We need it so much in so many different areas that we're willing to give up a tiny bit of safety to take a chance on something better. The chances of going bankrupt because of an idiot doctor, an inattentive nurse, or a heartless insurance company are so high that the risk/reward equation is heavily tipped in the other direction.
Doctors are allowed to try experimental treatments on their own patients. I see no reason why an open-source drug company couldn't partner with some meticulous and well-meaning doctors who are willing to try something different on the off-chance that it works out.
With full knowledge and consent of the patient, I don't see anything wrong with this.
And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other approaches to be taken...
But we won't know unless we try them.
1. Re:Another Malthusian Failure by Z34107 · 2012-02-23 17:13 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Yep. It definitely won't work, because we know that things never change and there's no other possible way that things can be done
  There's "no other possible way that things can be done" because most of them are illegal. Unless you want to get rid of the only part of the FDA's mandate it can actually carry out with any efficacy.
  
  --
  DATABASE WOW WOW
May we have some new antibiotics? PLEASE????? by PeterM+from+Berkeley · 2012-02-23 15:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

By FAR the biggest need for drugs we have is for new antibiotics.
I'd be willing to support, with my own money, antibiotic development efforts. I'd support use of public money for antibiotic development.
In the USA, some 90,000 people die every year due to antibiotic resistant infections and that number is growing every year. In 1992, that number was 13,000.
To put this in perspective, we get 30x the deaths every year from antibiotic resistance than was inflicted on us by the 9/11 attacks. Every year.
Where is our war on antibiotic resistant bugs? Where are the billions spent to combat this 30x greater (actually higher, because we don't have 9/11-scale attacks every year) threat to our lives?
Best,
--PeterM
Re:May we have some new antibiotics? PLEASE????? by Kozz · 2012-02-23 16:09 · Score: 5, Interesting

By FAR the biggest need for drugs we have is for new antibiotics.
Nope. That's just a treadmill-like arms race. What you want are bacteriophages.

--
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Re:May we have some new antibiotics? PLEASE????? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-02-23 16:36 · Score: 2

While developing new ones would certainly be nice, we should really be going after the low-hanging fruit and cracking down, hard, on the present overuse in veterinary applications. Unpopular among the direct beneficiaries, certainly; but cheap per-capita and a guaranteed way of improving the efficacy of the drugs we already have, not just the ones we hope to develop...
Re:May we have some new antibiotics? PLEASE????? by PeterM+from+Berkeley · 2012-02-23 18:40 · Score: 2

Actually, I don't care whether it's new antibiotics or phages or chemicals which disable bugs from being able to resist antibiotics, I do, however, want something that works, unlike antibiotics nowadays.
--PM
No, because there's no money in it by at0mjack · 2012-02-23 22:42 · Score: 2

Developing a new drug takes hundreds of millions of dollars. Suppose you spend that and you some up with a completely new class of antibiotics. You've now got two problems. Firstly, for 99.9% of the infections out there the existing antibiotics work very well and are now generic, meaning low cost. Quite apart from that, no clinician is going to prescribe your new "last resort" antibiotic for someone coming in with a sniffle: you keep it in reserve for the people with vancomycin-resistant MRSA. The combination of these two means that your total market is maybe a couple of thousand people per year. You've just burnt>US$500M on development costs, so how are you going to get that money back? The solution to the antibiotic problem is to quit misusing the ones that we already have. Nobody's going to develop new ones any time soon.