Startup developing HIV/AIDS vaccine is 2nd nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator

Making the world better, one batch at a time!

Well done, pg.

Do you have a link to the startups? As an International Development grad this is very exciting.

Maybe I'm blind or searchiotic but cliffs on what the other 6 are doing?

I think YC is one of the few places that could actually disrupt the academic publishing and reputation-bargaining field so I'm hoping some nonprofit will tackle this eventually.

I have been at times vocal in opposition to the type of companies that YC has funded in the past few batches, as the possibility of them improving life quality for people that actually need the improvement seemed quite small, largely based on a prospect of trickle down technology, which turns out to be as likely as trickle down economics, in that it rarely trickles out of San Francisco. Not saying those start-ups were easy, or not worth doing, as doing any start-up is by nature incredibly hard, and following your passion is always worth doing. But, YC's prominent role seemed ideal for doing something more, and it just didn't come.

I'll be equally vocal in support now. Watsi was the first sign of light, Immunity Project the second. This is what needs support, what needs money and hype. Realistically it won't get as much money as it needs, but with someone like YC pushing nonprofits like this, it's a huge step in the right direction. I can't wait to see the other nonprofits.

I know I sound like a bitter communist (is there any other kind?), but this really feels like an island of reason in the bubbly ocean of SF. Good luck to this batch.

Has YC considered any sort of broader access to the non-profits' portion of demo day for potential donors?

Out of curiosity, how do you approach non-profits from an investment point of view? Is there some equivalent to equity? Is the goal to break even, or are you essentially just providing a large initial donation?

Really cool to see yc taking things in this direction.

Hi all, this is Naveen from Immunity Project YC team. The fact that we are using ML to identify epitopes that are the preferred targets on the virus for HIV controllers is key to what makes our project unique. This is a newer approach for developing a vaccine and therefore makes it "rogue."

mainly because lots of money and time got wasted in finding a vaccine. HIV vaccine would be very very risky to use thats why research is looking for a cure

Just had the same thoughts... They try to get crowdfunding - so this is maybe just a kind of good PR ;-) [Edit] Just to make it clear: Nothing against the project itself. Any chance of getting a HIV vaccine should be used!

Yeah...

Anyone know how much YC is contributing and what they get in exchange? Some kind of ownership of the company?

Do people taking part in the $482,000 fund raiser get ownership of the company?

Why doesn't YC just donate money as part of the fund raiser?

I think exposure and access to investors is a pretty big one. I also think that YC should be able to bring some of the 'startup culture' to a domain that has historically been very enterprise-y (perhaps for good reasons of heavy capital needs).

According to the article Microsoft Research contributed $1M in 2011 (not the Gates Foundation but related)

We are pursuing all major funders we know of for funding for our work (including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation etc.). The challenge is that it takes significant time to prepare grants apps, and go through the process. Some large funders such as EJAF only accept grant applications once a year. HIV/AIDS is an urgent challenge. Therefore we are crowd funding these dollars now to move our project forward immediately. In terms of the PRJ question, the bottom line is its a chicken and egg problem. Its harder to get published if you release all of the data prior to publication. Post publication, our goal is to make our project as open access as humanely possible. All of that being said, we do have more information about our work on our site: http://www.immunityproject.org. If you have specific questions about our approach please feel free to ask them.

In some areas it’s usual to publish the preprints, for example in the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/ “Open access to 909,134 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics”

In some other areas, the journals have more strictly policies, and don’t like preprints, reprints, free author pdf copies, ...

I’d really like to see a peer-review article, even if that means waiting to see the research data. There is a lot of bullshit inside per-review articles, but there is even more bullshit outside per-review articles. A per-review is not a guaranty that the article is correct, but at least it guaranty that some expert in that area had read the article and had no found any major fault.

A very large amount of weight, at least in NIH grants of the size we'd be talking about, is preliminary data.

One paper that's not even in press yet isn't going to set off any fireworks in a grant review committee, especially with funding as tight as it is right now.

Most of the people who are living w/ HIV worldwide can't afford to pay for treatment. From our perspective it doesn't make sense to charge for something that the people who need it most just can't pay for. By making our project non profit we can focus on the real goal, which is ending HIV/AIDS and not creating ROI for shareholders. Yes we will need to raise significant funding over the lifetime of the project to complete this goal. The good news is that our team is very efficient. The current experiment we are hoping to execute will be done at a fraction of the price and in a fraction of the time then what it would typically cost / take at a major pharma company.

Further answer: Yes the plan is to raise funds from all possible sources over time. We are open to talking to traditional pharma firms as well but we aim to keep the vaccine free to the end consumer.

I think they mean they train the immune system by creating an antigen, not an antibody, that mimics or is identical to the nonmutating antigen on the virus. Your immune system upregulates appropriate antibodies on its own through a feedback effect when certain cells (B cell?) that have randomly generated embedded antibodies on their cell membranes come across an antigen.

These cells begin to divide faster, and the children code for and generate the same antibody as the parent. This ups the amount of cells with that particular antibody, increasing the probability that the antigen will be targeted. They trigger inflammation to increase the flow of blood, letting more immune cells per second pass through scan the area (probably not helpful for aids, but for a cut, a splinter or a tumor that is fixed in place it is useful). They also release freestanding antibodies with the same binding profile that can disable viruses and trigger other immune cells to come slurp them up.

I think when they say they aren't taking an antibody approach they mean they aren't making an artificial antibody and just injecting it for passive immunity (sort of like injecting an immune system that can't do its own adaptation and upregulation)

The main thing with vaccines I am still confused about is what the difference between them and allergy shots is, and how do the two end up with opposite effects? I guess there is somehow a different reaction to a spike of something vs a repeated presence.

(Edit: never mind.. microspheres.. who knew?)

Instead of using standard vaccine practices (a dead/damaged/live version of the virus) to train your immune system, we are using these synthetic entities called microspheres. They are made of the same material as internal sutures, and your body takes them up and is able to have a memory response. Check out this youtube clip of the microspheres in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XKy9byo67w

The advantage of using microspheres is that the vaccine is now monumentally safer than previous gene therapy or other vaccine attempts.

I get what you're talking about, but right now I personally feel happy that this effect is increasing, and I hope to be the part of this small group at some point.

It's because, to be honest, majority of humans just doesn't give a crap about anything that's further than 10cm from the end of their noses. The opposite of world priorities being set by fewer and fewer people is not lots of good things happening, it's nothing of importance ever happening. Want a proof? Just look at internal politics of every democratic state. Tons of resources get wasted, and nothing ever gets done, because people just can't agree on anything.

I suspect that those people value the fact that this is happening more than the fact that they don't "get" to complain about it not happening.

Yeah, lets wait and see how fast they get their $25M. Giiven that photo sharing apps can get billions of dollars just like that, if the Immunity Project will have to struggle for their $25M, I'm giving up on SV altogether.

I'm a bit confused. Who is the "you" here?

God forbid the people doing the actual work would get the credit.

Right now the project is only relying epitopes derived from actual controller targets. Our hypothesis is that if we go after the epitopes that HIV controllers preferentially target that we will get an immune response with memory in humans just as we have so far in our animal studies. The only way to test this is to execute on our clinical trial in humans. The current experiment we are aiming to perform is a good middle ground since we will be immunizing human blood against HIV in a controlled environment and then testing that immunity.

We're absolutely planning on doing an AMA on reddit in the near future!

The "targetting capability", definitely does have implications for other types of viruses. While this vaccine focuses on giving the power of HIV controllers to everybody, other controllers do exist. For example, there may be controllers for other viruses like Hepatitis, HPV, Herpes, or even things like other viruses that cause cancer.

Thanks, jjoe! We really appreciate your support.

Monkeys. After all, the HI virus originates from apes and they are similar enough to humans for clinical tests. And as for "ethical research", once you know the vaccine will not harm you, give it to a big enough group of "risk people" in Africa or another HIV hotspot and look if they, compared with a placebo group, are immune from HIV.

For human trials of this nature, typically at-risk populations can be used, and it's seen if there's a reduction in infection rates.

I'm Ian Cinnamon, one of the members of the Immunity Project YC team. We have in fact developed the vaccine. We've completed 2 years of animal testing, and we have one final experiment to run before we start our Phase I Clinical Trials in humans. In order to test the efficacy of the vaccine in human trials, we go to Durban, South Africa, where HIV has a prevalence rate of ~15%. We dose a wide range of healthy volunteers, and we check back again at regular intervals to make sure they have no contracted HIV. We're also able to perform a wide range of laboratory tests to show the dosed human blood is now immune to HIV.

> How exactly would they go about and test if it works on humans?

Presumably, the same as the other HIV vaccines that are in trials.

> Are there people who volunteer to get infected with HIV?

There are people who volunteer for vaccine trials. They don't need to volunteer to get infected with HIV -- basically, you get a large enough experimental and control group, study risk factors in the groups, and track infection rates, and evaluate whether, based on that, the vaccine reduces infection rates.

Yes we've developed a vaccine prototype and we are raising funds for the final experiment before we start working with the FDA to file our IND and start working on our phase I clinical trial. In terms of testing on humans, the first thing you do is dose healthy volunteers and withdraw a blood sample to test for an immune response. Then assuming success in phase I, in a phase II trial we will dose high risk healthy volunteers and see if they get HIV over a time interval.

The betterment of the world as a whole?

It's simple, it isn't an investment in the financial sense.

I assume it's a tax dodge of some sort. I'm sure that investments in non-profits can be offset against capital gains (or something like that).

I'm not an investor and this isn't tax advice!

If you cure AIDS, you're worth probably $50B, so there's that.

If you're vaccinated, your body would fight off the HIV virus. You would have an upgraded immune system.

In terms of independently curing AIDS, although the vaccine has therapeutic potential, it mostly likely applies only to those particular individuals living with HIV who have normal immune systems – i.e. those successfully managed on HAART medications. The vaccine may prevent AIDS, but it will not cure AIDS.

So make it happen (seriously).

HIV/AIDS is a giant problem. North of 35MM people are living with HIV worldwide and more are infected every day. Yes we have made strides in reducing infection rates, but we are far from solving this problem with existing approaches. To put this in context, nearly 5,000 people a day die from AIDS. That is like 10 747s falling out of the sky every single day. The only solution is a vaccine which is why we are doing what we are doing. There are many big problems for us to solve on our planet. HIV/AIDS is one of the biggest and hardest to solve.

Bill Gates just addressed this [1], showing the faulty thinking behind this idea that saving lives is ultimately bad for the earth.

"It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too.

This pattern of falling death rates followed by falling birth rates applies for the vast majority of the world. Demographers have written a lot about this phenomenon. The French were the first to start this transition, toward the end of the 18th century. In France, average family size went down every decade for 150 years in a row. In Germany, women started having fewer children in the 1880s, and in just 50 years family size had mostly stabilized again. In Southeast Asia and Latin America, average fertility dropped from six or seven children per woman to two or three in a single generation, thanks in large measure to the modern contraceptives available by the 1960s.

Because most countries—with exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—have now gone through this transition, the global population is growing more slowly every year. As Hans Rosling, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and one of my favorite data geeks, said, “The amount of children in the world today is probably the most there will be! We are entering into the age of the Peak Child!”"

Saving lives will improve humanity and -- as humanity has discovered -- actually contributes to fewer births. This is one of the reasons we see shrinking populations in 25 nations including Japan, Ukraine, Italy, Greece. [2]

The reality is that saving lives counterintuitively decreases population through lower birth rates, which may ultimately help the earth.

Also, observe that the world is at its highest population today, and yet, billions of humans are totally resource-secure. Why this counter-intuitive phenomenon? It's largely thanks to technological advancements in farming and genetics. There is no reason to believe this trend will not continue.

[1]: http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/?cid=bg_gn_ll0_01202...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

Something like this, but for cancer? Here you go: http://www.indysci.org/project-marilyn.html

Thank you for your support!

There's a lot of non-profits that aim to make birth control more wide-spread, too. Do you have any other ideas how overpopulation can be tackled by a startup with purely legal methods?