Open Cures - working around the biggest problem in medical development

The present state of affairs with respect to regulation of research and commercial development of biotechnologies in the US leads us into a situation wherein there are any number of languishing lines of research aimed at intervening in the aging process. They cannot cost-effectively be commercially developed by the US-based groups that demonstrated their effectiveness in animals in the laboratory -- or cannot be developed at all, since the FDA will not approve treatments for aging, and that has the predictable effect on the number of investors willing to pony up for the privilege of running into a brick wall.

A similar dampening effect on development stems from the present state of intellectual property laws, which are three shades of ridiculous. But that barrier is less important, I feel, than the FDA's stance on aging and treatments for aging. One thing at a time.

Outside the US there are a number of developed nations which in which commercial medical development is less regulated. China for example - and US citizens of a certain age will no doubt feel sad that we can now point to modern day China as an example of comparative freedom in human endeavor. Not sad for the Chinese, but sad for us.Other nations in that part of the world are similarly more open than the US when it comes to commercial development of new medicaltechnology: even India, despite its bureaucracy.

When we look to the future of commercial longevity-enhancing medical technologies - or indeed any cutting edge biotechnology - I think we're looking at the process of building a bridge between the less restricted parts of the world and the output of the US research community. That bridge is forged of medical tourism, venture investment, and a flow of knowledge. Without it, little will bedeveloped: there must be an outlet for new science to become new technology, and that outlet is being progressively narrowed in the US with each passing year.

Now I can't do anything about medical tourism or venture investment, but I can persuade people to help contribute to the flow of knowledge: to establish a bridge between potential longevity-enhancing technologies that have been demonstrated in the laboratory but can never be fully realized in the US, and developers half a world away who are more free to translate the fruits of research into clinical application. This is a matter of documentation, of building relationships, and of pulling out the most interesting items into the light. Despite this shrinking world, it is still far from the case that researchers on opposite sides of the world have a good view into what is and isn't accomplished.

I think that there's a lot that might be done to help this process along, especially given the fact that we're moving into an age of open biotechnology - the impetus, as in software development, will be towards openly shared knowledge and designs, because the economic advantages that confers are enormous. Accompanying this shift will be a growing community of lab collectives, semi-professional developers, and hobbyists. They already exist in the form of the DIYbio community, but that is just the earliest manifestation of what is to come, more akin to the Homebrew Computer Club of the 1970s that spawned computing hardware companies and the rampant growth that followed.

So I have started a volunteer initiative, an open collaboration for everyone interested in taking the most interesting published longevity science demonstrated in the laboratory and building a bridge from it to those groups who might be able to develop it commercially in the near future.