Hacker News Reader

Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

Given the high cost (hundreds of millions) of taking a vaccine through clinical trials, FDA approval and production I'm curious why the choice to go the non-profit route.

Is the growth plan to raise the money from large donors (Gates foundation, Wellcome Trust, etc.) or to licence the technology to more traditional pharma firms ?

View on HN

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.

Is there some special "trick" that makes your team/approach so efficient or (just) the usual ones, e.g. less overhead due to small size, less bureaucracy than big pharma and so on?

Yes our overhead is far lower. Our other "trick" is that several members of our team are multi-talented. For example Dr. Herst can do tissue culture work, formulation development, analytical chemistry, and immunochemistry.

I really really from all of my heart wish that your project will work. Seriously, the idea of a free HIV vaccine is amazing. But honestly, I believe that you might all be a bit naive when it comes to doing proper molecular biology experiments. There's a reason why most PhD students need several years to finish their studies and they mostly use just a few techniques. Doing experiments with humanized mice and HIV might sound easy on paper, but will turn out to be way more complicated than what you believe it to be now. Trust me, been there, done that. Anyways, I wish you all the best, I love it when people challenge old dogmas with new ideas. I'd appreciate it a lot if you could put some more information about the biology, especially the role if the immune system, online.

That said, what's your bus factor like?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

While I appreciate that it's possible to cut down the upfront costs with talented staff, it still seems that things like clinical trials will cost hundreds of millions of dollars (at least that's the price range I've seen for anti-malarial vaccination clinical trials) and still have a substantial chance of failure at later stage trials.

It would seem difficult to raise that kind of money from other than big pharma or typical pharma capital market sources who would want to see a large pay-off from such an risky investment (i.e. selling it in countries which could afford it).

Best of luck in any case!

It is not unlikely that some developing country like India, Brazil or Nigeria could pony up the money and provide access to regulatory fast tracks if the research seems promising enough.

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.

Great, that's what I was looking for. Saying "provide the vaccine for free" on the site, I was cynical and assumed it just meant the results/formulation would be published but someone would still have to create it and ultimately it would be a product that is sold. It's good to hear your goal is to have the vaccine be actually free to the end consumer, that's awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com