Founder-driven life sciences companies
axial.substack.com
axial.substack.com
It's kinda understandable given that some drugs can have serious negative long term effects on people, whereas a buggy CRUD app can't really do much harm in comparison.
While the costs of a "buggy" drug are usually larger than the cost of a buggy app, the benefits of a "good" drug are usually larger than the benefit of yet another app to share pictures, or a uber but for X.
Just see how much it costs to save the economy just from the corona measures. The opposite of that is the benefit of a 1 year increase of people's healthy life spans, much more in fact as only parts of the economy were shut down.
I'm not really involved in pharma, but there seems to be a decent argument for selling the drug with provisional approval after safety has been established and collecting outcomes data for those who use provisional drugs https://reason.com/2018/02/02/right-to-try-fda-drug-trials/
In pharma, I think the success criteria are much better understood, but it's just really hard to do what people want.
Not so say our regulatory system isn't a shitshow that needs reform, but I don't think there is the same benefit of releasing buggy versions.
Having said that, there are a lot of arguments for reforming how we do later stage clinical trials to provide access to potentially life saving drugs as well as reducing the costs of drug development https://reason.com/2018/02/02/right-to-try-fda-drug-trials/
We need to clone decephalized humans. Turn off neural plate development. Downregulate genes that cause brain development. Before we get this right we can supplement it with surgical techniques to ensure the clones never have brains and never become sentient. Hook the embryos up to artificial life support that innervate heart, lungs, and replace hormonal signalling.
We could have a facility full of live, brainless monoclonal humans. We could perform research that wasn't previously possible due to ethics and invasiveness.
As a side benefit, we now have a limitless blood and organ supply for transplantation. Ideally without any antigens that react with transplant patients, guaranteeing transplant recipients never need to take quality of life-altering immunosuppressants.
If we can treat real human bodies like lab rats, we'll conquer every cancer and have a real chance of doubling human healthspan.
We have to get out of "punch card" phase biology. Unfortunately, it'll require wading out into uncomfortable new frontiers that many won't be happy to broach. This requires that you accept that there is no soul, that humans are code, and that we are now the authors.
If I ever get Elon Musk money, I'm doing this.
2. We spend a lot of time "humanizing" model organisms by creating chimeras. But even then the results are frequently not portable. How many animal studies fail to make the jump to advanced clinical trials?
3. A human is the system you want to study. It has the same genome, the same transcriptome, the same proteome, the same metabolome, and the same kinetics and thermodynamics. Animal models are 17th century dentistry in comparison.
To draw an analogy, this would introduce such a huge gap between “staging” and “prod” environments that the effort and the ethical risk of ending up with “staging” entities possessing any degree of human consciousness cannot even remotely be worth it. (I’m somewhat alarmed that I feel the need to spell that out.)
How is cancer something you can fix with mental health therapy? Tell them to go home and feel better, that it'll all be over soon?
What about a host of other genetic and immune disorders, many of which can be fatal?
I don't mean to come across as harsh or mocking, but there are a host of diseases where your solution does not work.
> I’m somewhat alarmed that I feel the need to spell that out
I understand your argument, but I reject it because I don't think we're seeing the same picture of where things now stand or could be. I'll counter with an analogy of my own.
Right now we're attempting to fix issues in prod by looking at another company's software, decompiling it, bit fiddling a bit, then trying to hot patch it into our own production instance. We run some smoke tests before releasing things, but these can't always identify long-term effects.
I want to have an actual honest to god dev and staging environment. Not just that, but a system that looks remarkably like prod that we can burn down and spin up on demand for each investigator trying to solve novel problems.
We can actually test at scale (and duration!) and pick apart the system to see that no part of it goes into failure mode or disease state.
Development goes much faster when you have an actual dev kit to run your code on or tear apart.
We don't have anything like that right now.
I get that the notion that human beings being equated to fungible software or disposable hunks of meat is uncomfortable. But the special ingredient in both you and me is consciousness, and this design ensures we never bring new consciousness to life. We turn off the gene expression that causes the brain to develop, and we can double down with mechanical amputation.
It sounds macabre, but so too did dissecting cadavers a century ago.
The staging/prod analogy is flawed.
What we are doing is manipulating board wiring, while what we could do is further our understanding of and abilities to alter the OS and firmware running on it.
Very unfortunately, but understandably, scientifically oriented mindset tends to dismiss the latter route. After all, so far it seemingly rules out any notion of dev environment. Where is reproducibility, if all we can do is SSH into a snowflake live system (or more like XSS inject it, right)? A daunting limitation, but perhaps not impossible to overcome.
That is not to say the former has no place and your point is invalid. Still, when all you have is a hammer…
I agree. Thanks for providing a better one.
> Where is reproducibility, if all we can do is SSH into a snowflake live system
That's the beauty of this, though. You'd have monoclonal lines of decephalized humans. They're not snowflakes.
You'd have knockout lines for studying specific genes, ABO- lines for a blood supply, lines for all the major MHC/HLA for transplants...
If you have twenty identical deceph human clones, you can run your same experiment in duplicate and push for statistically meaningful results.
Over time we'd aim to reduce the costs of the bodies so that they are cheap to expend in individual experiments. That's when it becomes incredibly powerful, when the average researcher can afford these in their budget.
We might learn to control the rate of development. Quickly grow them in a way that doesn't interfere with the experimental results.
Your approach does not duplicate the OS, only hardware wiring. Again, not to say fiddling with condensers and transistors can’t fix a misbehaving program, but it’s not always the best way to address the issue with fewest side-effects.
Some may be, sure.
But could it be that a blanket claim like that comes from us already knowing how to access the hardware, and being uncomfortable to wander out of that comfort zone?
Of course you can’t “tell” the disease to go away any more you can tell a bug to take a hike, but saying we can manipulate the hardware to trigger whatever immune, etc. responses just as well comes from that being the thing we can sort of do reliably at this point.
And even then, can we really?
Read about the phenomenon of cascading medical involvement during childbearing and birth: turns out “hardware manipulation”, which is very compelling to do, tends to have compounding hidden consequences, while the adjustments in the elusive “software” (inducing relaxed state etc.) somehow appear to yield straightforward results. Again, immediately life-threatening conditions aside.
Manipulating transistors and condensers (triggering an immune response, in your example) might just be a suboptimal, incomplete approach when compared to updating the firmware logic (making it so that the response is triggered when and how needed), or of course better yet both.
Our discomfort with the associated uncertainty, however, makes this an unfashionable direction of scientific exploration.
Let's say it's possible to trigger immune response by focusing really hard. Still we need the brainless human to determine which signals the brain needs to send before we start trying to get people to focus really hard.
Typically only people that believe in a soul or that humans "should die" take issue.
Neither of these is correct in my world view. I can understand the religious perspective, but the romantic idea that limited live spans are good is incredibly twisted.
I think people should be immortal, but that's just not feasible. The next best thing is using all of the tools around us to extend our lives as much as possible.
I'm tired of biology being so punch-card slow while the compiler is literally staring us in the face. The human is the perfect model organism for everything we want to accomplish, and I've shown that we can ethically build upon it as a platform without harming anyone. Moreover, we can farm it. Never deal with blood or organ shortages, end immunosuppressants for many people, and potentially perform purely regenerative surgeries.
A human grown in a lab without a brain is a plant. Dogs, apes, and octopuses are more human than that. Before you fight me, go take on the many acts of animal cruelty in the world.
The people that would hold this back are Luddites.
This is a faster path to curing cancer. All fifty thousand types of it.
edit: Down voters, why not argue your point instead? Because from my perspective your views are a dated death wish.
I'm not interested in "fighting" you,but the reality is that you're starting from a non-starter position that would never fly in the larger general public.
It's not worth debating, because you're absolutely, totally convinced that you're right. Most of us here agree that in principle it would be great to be able to run experiments that truly address human medical problems without ethical concern, but I think "decephalized humans" don't really qualify.
At one point in time the majority of the general public was against gay marriage. Two hundred years ago many were pro slavery. Everyone used to be against cutting up dead bodies so we could learn how they worked, so it was conducted in secrecy.
Most people are illiterate about the science behind this. The benefits are real and substantial. This isn't a money grab or vanity project - it pushes humanity forward a notch, and it should be done.
Anti-vax, anti-GMO, anti-scientific thought shouldn't prevent us from developing a tool that saves countless lives.
We're even growing brain tissue that exhibits actual human-like brain waves for experimentation - how is that okay with you!?
Call us Luddites but this type of science is not looked at kindly. There's no argument or debate to be had when what you are proposing is a red line for many and a non-starter.
Why?
1) Sourcing. how many viable cancer immunotherapy startups are there
2) Due diligence how good are you at separating the wheat from the chaff
3) Competition how much seed investment are they receiving vs how much they require, it does sound like a niche market
4) Strategy what are the timeframes involved, when do you get to “realize” your investment, riding them out to IPO?, etc
5) how will you accelerate their growth, contacts, help them with their own strategy etc...
Now these factors play into the success of the fund in their interactions. Example 1 and 2 are not ideal but 3 is a situation with little competition, you might be able to get better deals more equity. Obviously a lot of domain knowledge is required but if you are able to address these 5 things satisfactorily then you might easily find money chasing you.
After that it’s just coming up with a good investment structure (ex. certain international investors seek tax sheltering), some lawyers and choosing limited partners. Shouldn’t be too hard especially given the level and recognition this gentleman should command in his industry.
Link to an article on the topic: https://medium.com/bit-pharma/how-do-you-deal-with-cancer-3e...