Google Aims a $50M Moonshot at Curing Heart Disease | Hacker News Reader

Google Aims a $50M Moonshot at Curing Heart Disease

wired.com

75 pointscryptoz59 comments

Or, 0.8% of the NIH's annual funding for curing heart disease.

That's nice, but the tech press is doing is pretty poor job conveying the overall role of public vs private funding in basic science research. Same issue came up around YC Research.

It's true that Google's approach is to hand more money to one team instead of spreading it among many investigators. But the overall tone of the article is there are "swings" in funding and private companies are stepping in with "jackpot" grants to save the day. If you didn't read closely you might even think public funding is drying up and Silicon Valley private investors are the future of core science research.

This fundamentally and completely confuses how core science research happens and in fact how Silicon Valley itself was created and functions today (with respect to core tech research through agencies like DARPA as well as medical science via NIH). Collaboration with the private sector is an important piece of that but this one figure puts it in perspective: The annual NIH budget for heart research alone is $1.2 billion. Bottom line, you can still thank Uncle Sam and taxpayers for most major research.

That was my first thought. "Oh, this'll be a really nice handful of R01 style grants..."

Take it for what it is: a cheap way to score PR points. Most Google "moonshot" projects not related to ads fall into this category. Fucking internet in Africa from self driving robotic balloons.

Internet in Africa from balloons would solve many issues. Mobile internet has far more penetration than fixed-line broadband because of infrastructure challenges. Providing another means of low-cost wireless connectivity to millions of people would be a powerful enabler, and drive costs down.

I constantly find myself surprised by how quickly Africans, who are pretty much written off by most people, adapt to new technologies.

Polio, malaria, sanitation, nutrition should come first. A-la the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On the priority list for those people getting showered with ads is somewhere towards the bottom.

This whole situation very much reminds me of the scene from The Fifth Element where the deaf guy throws the protagonist a couple of billiard balls instead of a gun.

Polio, malaria, sanitation, and nutrition are far more important, first order. However, improving communications (and I don't know whether self driving robotic internet balloons is the best way to do that) might reasonably make it quite a bit easier to address those.

$50M over 5 years is a "moonshot"? Let's hope Wired is to blame for such hype; Google surely knows better. Even $50B is no moonshot. Try $500B to $5T and a commitment of many thousands of man-years. Now THAT's a moonshot. $50M is not even "A War on Heart Disease". At most it's a skirmish.

To wit, $50M/5 years is $10M per year. In Silly Valley, that buys you up to 20 staff, with no lab. So in 5 years, 20 Googlers armed only with whiteboards will succeed beyond the thousands and billions and decades of scientific research that have gone before?

Gotta love the reality distortion field that is SV.

I thought that moonshot just means "unlikely to succeed, but with potential to be big".

They're going to cure heart disease, not write the next snapchat. I bet in most states and most cities it'll buy you a lab and 50 staff and enough goods for a while.

They won't have to actually produce the cure, just develop enough theory and experiments to convince investors to drop a billion on them for going through everything that's needed for human testing.

>They're going to cure heart disease, not write the next snapchat.

Are you suggesting that curing heart disease is an easier and cheaper endeavor than building a mobile app for sharing photos?

Statins alone are a >$10b annual market, down from $20b annually before Lipitor's patent expired. Pharma companies have proven that curative treatments can be priced near the net present value of all future disease management costs, making cures the most lucrative area of pharma (a good thing if it leads to more of them). There are billions of private dollars being sunk into heart disease annually. I'm not sure exactly what Google is after here but $50m is not going to move the needle from a funding or incentive perspective.

The way I understood the Google X moonshot strategy is that they put the money behind some idea that seems farfetched or unorthodox. I fully understand $50M doesn't mean anything to the industry as a whole, but you can't tell me it wouldn't impact any single early-stage idea or research direction.

Google is not looking to fund heart disease research in general, they're going to fund one particular potential solution. One that's probably not seeing any of that $20B at this moment. Probably because the idea is farfetched, risky and potentially not financially viable.

Right. "Heart Disease" is a huge space of medical pathologies, from atherosclerosis to stenosis to cardiomyopathy to abnormal signal creation / propagation to so much more. Hoping to "cure" any one of these is a goal greater than even a giant pharma or major medical research institute would entertain, especially in just 5 years.

If creating the average new drug to merely treat a disease usually costs an experienced pharma between $2B and $6B, then $50M quite simply will not "cure heart disease". To suggest otherwise is akin to promising a miracle cure to a dying child's mother. It's either clueless or manipulative. Let's hope that foolish verbiage arose from careless reporting, and not from Google.

Not really. I'd guess a PI and 2 associates in each lab would run $325k. A single drug will touch about 8 or 10 labs in the 4 or so years to get out of pre-clinical development. Without any benefits, managers, equipment, lab space, or animals, you're already eating $10 million.

Monkey tox studies are expensive and required before human trials. I'd guess that it'd take 50 capital equipment pieces averaging somewhere around $150k. The barrier to entry is pretty high.

> They're going to cure heart disease, not write the next snapchat.

Precisely. Which do you think is the more difficult one?

Indeed.

> just develop enough theory and experiments to convince investors to drop a billion on them for going through everything that's needed for human testing.

Not even close. The Stowers Institute for Medical Research [0] is a good comparison for how to do it right--$2 billion donated over a decade gets you in the door of creating a sustainable entity, facility and environment that has a chance of attracting the kind of top scientists (and their staffs) to do the type of basic research you describe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stowers_Institute_for_Medical_...

> 50M over 5 years is a "moonshot"? Let's hope Wired is to blame for such hype; Google surely knows better.

"Moonshot" appears to be a Google term of art for a focused project with a long expected period between initiation and potential payout (reflected in, e.g., the identification of many Google X, and some non-X, projects as "moonshots", and in Astro Teller's "Captain of Moonshots" title.)

So, even though this is Google funding to an external team, I can see how it shares the traits of Google-internal "moonshot" and why Google might use the term.

Even in silly valley, people do not cost $500k/year. That said, 20 people or fewer once you pay for a wetlab.

> Even in silly valley, people do not cost $500k/year.

And Silicon Valley isn't exactly a hotbed of basic biomedical research, so I'd be surprised if the team that writes the application that wins the grant is based there.

Wouldn't they likely award the money to a group with a good chance of success? People with some experience, and per chance ideas they think would work if they had the money to test them out? Wouldn't those people already work in an existing lab?

"Moonshot" is a Google term for "we are going to put some money into this really long-shot idea, with the hope that even if we don't achieve the stated objective we'll get some cool technology/IP out of it." Take a look a Project Loon and (initially) Google Fiber for other "moonshots."

That said, Google projects benefit from having a huge infrastructure and amazing academic links (you can collaborate with Stanford/MIT/etc. to generate research.) It's not just a startup starting from scratch with $50m, but an established player with deep pockets and amazing connections. Wanna collaborate with the leading specialist in this field? Google can make it happen. Wanna try some algorithm in 20k cores for a few weeks? Go for it. Wanna lobby around to get government involvement? There's a whole department for that.

But it's an analogy to Apollo, right? Which wasn't just a long shot, but one with enormous funding. Maybe they should pick a new term if they want to describe a long-shot that gets almost no funding.

How about "Shot in the Dark"? Or "1024:1 Shot"?

"Long shot"? English already has a good shot-based idiom here.

I actually don't know the timeline. I wonder if people were using the expression "shooting for the moon" before Apollo happened, or if the moon race was what generated the phrase?

From what I can dig up casually, it looks like "moonshot" is from the space race, dating to 1958, but "shoot for the moon" might be earlier. And according to this, "shoot the moon" means to leave without paying rent:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=&search...

Which is kind of funny.

A bit late google. Depending on what you mean by heart disease (it is a very broad category), but if you mean heart disease caused by high cholesterol then it has already been cured and available as a license monoclonal - Evolocumab [1]. We know that knocking the protein it targets (PCSK9) is without side-effects in humans [2]. It will take a few years before everyone is on it, but basically all the science is done.

Edit. Personally I like the vaccine approach [3] as it could be low cost and avoid the need for monthly injections, but I doubt we will ever see this taken through to market. If google wanted to do some good then spend their money sponsoring a human trial of the PCSK9 vaccine.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolocumab

2. http://www.nature.com/news/genetics-a-gene-of-rare-effect-1....

3. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X15...

>"For instance, the entire project will be in the hands of a single leader. That person is far from pre-determined.

With a laugh, Conrad said the screening process began with the announcement that the job exists. He wants proposals that can fit on a single piece of paper.

The single most important requirement is a creative vision.

“It could be a teenager in Wisconsin who has a brilliant idea,” Conrad said. “The best idea should triumph." [..] The leader will be tasked with putting together an overall plan, which includes assembling a team of researchers, engineers, scientists and other specialists."

http://blog.heart.org/american-heart-association-google-life...

I don't mean to be negative, I am glad to see new sources of funding for biomed. But I do not understand how this would work. What would the role of this teenager in Wisconsin be beyond writing the application? How would they know who to assemble onto the team, etc? Also, a single page proposal?

> Also, a single page proposal?

A lot of small pilot proposals are pretty short - Gates Challenge, proposals for example are two pages, and I've done some investigator-initiated grants from industry that are only a couple pages long. My guess is they'll be slicing the actual $50M pretty thinly.

It sounds like a scene from a movie ("the Exam").

It sounds more like they're looking for the next Elizabeth Holmes (of Theranos).

>And as you might expect from a Silicon Valley giant that believes in moving fast and breaking things

They also believe in thinking differently and putting a PC on every desktop.

Yes, the $$ amount is unrealistic for any true cure. But won't it be great if they fund non-traditional (i.e., silicon valley) people who maybe get even a single advancement in cardiac care? Certainly that's money well spent. I hope they do well.

Yep, you gotta hand it to HackerNews. A company donates $50M towards a good cause that can save lives, and everyone takes a shit all over it. How did you spend your last 50 bucks?

How does Google plan to succeed when the entire medical establishment has been trying to do the same thing for years ?

Not sarcastic: At what point do you start considering the medical establishment is down a dead end path? How much time and money needs to be spent? Maybe we need to restart from the understanding in 1932 or whenever.

Is there a actually any information in that press release (or the near verbatim Wired article) on what research this will fund? I could not see any.

Google shows what they know: Advertising. :-)

At least it worked for me, it just became more likely I switch to Android next time (there are a lot of heart problems among my relatives).

This also have a high chance of literally saving the lives of people whose money is put down here.

In short: Thanks.

Given that the AHA is basically a front for the meat and cheese industry, I don't see why Google is funneling money to them. You might as well pay Coca-Cola to 'research' diabetes or Exxon to 'research' climate change.

Could you please provide some sources for this claim? If this is legitimately true, I would like to know this, but a random statement on the internet leaves me rather skeptical.

https://www.cspinet.org/integrity/nonprofits/american_heart_...

http://www.foodpolitics.com/2011/02/american-heart-associati...

They also lobby against government policies that would eliminate meat from school lunches, even though they would vastly reduce the incidence of heart disease in the U.S.

very interesting links! but far from damning - they make a couple of percent of their income from the heart-check logos which were put on several lean cuts of beef. ConAgra donates some money (they were among the top couple dozen contributors - most of which were medical companies.) color me not-outraged, but more informed.

You really don't see anything unethical about accepting money to promote ineffective drugs, red meat, and junk food as the cures to heart disease?

Hm.. Well that seems to be a shame.. This follows a weird trend of non-profits monetizing their brand-symbol of endorsement or support. Reading about this reminds me of another non profit that I dislike a decent amount, the Susan G Komen Foundation which has been known to aggresively protect their trademarks to the point of suing other smaller charities[0]. You are right that the AHA is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

[0]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/komen-foundation-ch...

I don't understand the point of this research. We already cured heart disease: take grains (including corn and soy), refined sugars, legumes, and seed oils out of your diet, increase red meat, healthy fat, and vegetable intake, and do regular exercise.

For those that already have heart disease, increase Omega 3 (triglyceride or phospholipid bound, not ethyl ester), CoQ10, and PQQ supplementation to help repair the damage.

When the media talks about "curing heart disease", they really mean "curing it without eating healthy, which is the only known cure". Why doesn't everyone just learn to eat healthy instead? It fixes everything.

Edit: Down-voting me without actually commenting why you disagree doesn't really help. Why do you think eating strange diets that have only really been recently developed since the end of WW2 are healthy or medically necessary? Especially since the rise of heart disease, diabetes, and chronic obesity have only become a problem during the same time period, even after accounting for better detection and diagnosis rates.

I didn't downvote you but I think you are being downvoted because you give the impression that if I asked the leading experts in cardiology how to avoid heart disease they would give me the definite answer you have. However if you talked to the top 100 cardiologists they would not all share your views.

For instance everyone agrees vegetables and exercise are great. The information about COQ10, PQQ, and omega-3s are still very much in their infancy. Many doctors would disagree with out about red meat. Exactly what is healthy fat, and how much we should intake could be debated for eons. One of the top cardiologists in the U.S. just told my friends father to stop eating all fats and meats to reduce his risk of heart disease.

With regards to legumes, people who live in a "blue zones"(places with very large number of people 100 years or older+) eat a legume heavy diet.

So I don't think that the problems is as simple and solved as you make it out to be.

Do people who do all of this stuff have a zero chance of heart disease, or does it just greatly reduce the chances?

Especially since the rise of heart disease, diabetes, and chronic obesity have only become a problem during the same time period

Right, because we can't think of a single other factor that has changed during that time period apart from diet?

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