It seems safe to describe Andrew Hessel as an unbridled optimist. After all, he’s selling $20 shares in a journey towards a personalized cure for breast cancer, which he says could be feasible in the next few years.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times Andrew Hessel describes the Pink Army Cooperative as the first “biotech company that is owned by the people.”
Mr. Hessel serves as the managing director of the Pink Army Cooperative. This Canadian organization has set out to lower the cost of cancer treatments, while also making them more effective by embracing a new wave of synthetic biology technology (a field that was recently the subject of a piece in The New York Times Magazine).
In particular, the group hopes to build a relatively cheap virus in its labs that could be tweaked on an individual basis to hunt down and kill breast cancer cells.
While there are plenty of start-ups chasing this same, very challenging goal, Mr. Hessel has set up the first “biotech company that is owned by the people,” as he puts it.
A payment of 20 Canadian dollars (about 20 American dollars at current exchange rates) will buy you a spot in this cooperative. That fee entitles you to have access to the cancer cure created by the cooperative — if the organization can solve a host of massive technological, legal and economic issues first, of course. Breast cancer patients receiving the cure would also have to pay extra money for tests and treatment.
“You would be getting drug development as a subscription service,” Mr. Hessel said. “You have to be a member of the co-op to get access to the drug pipeline.”
Since the cooperative is a not-for-profit entity, it would not seek to make money from the testing and procedures. Mr. Hessel pitches this approach, where members would own the intellectual property around a cure, as being in stark contrast to the norms of the biotech industry today.
“Right now, we have a biotech industry that can only go after multibillion-dollar drug blockbusters,” Mr. Hessel said. “That limits what they can work on, and frankly, the biotech companies have made very little progress when it comes to curing cancer over the past few decades.
Mr. Hessel admits that his project hasn’t made much progress itself so far. Recruiting members has been difficult. When I joined the co-op a couple of weeks ago so I could learn more about what it was telling members, I was Member No. 106.
Mr. Hessel said that he is planning on launching a large social networking campaign to drum up support. “If an onion ring can get 1 million Facebook backers, we can,” he joked.
Mr. Hessel spent seven years working as a research operations manager for Amgen, one of the world’s largest biotech companies. He left the company, in part due to frustrations about its approach to drug discovery.
Amgen, like most of its peers, continues to develop generalized drugs and then push them through the arduous approval process.
Mr. Hessel and others contend that current drug development fails to adapt to the rapid changes sweeping through biotech. The cost of sequencing genetic data continues to fall at exponential rates. Meanwhile, the tools needed for synthetic biology continue to fall in price as well, giving more people a means of basically typing out genetic code on a machine.
“The drugs coming to market today were started 10 years ago and are pre-genomic,” Mr. Hessel said. “They are obsolete. We understand considerably more about living organisms now.”
Under the Pink Army Cooperative’s plan, the group will start with one breast cancer patient. It will pay to sequence the DNA of her tumor and compare that to her overall DNA profile.
Then, the company would need to program a virus to hunt down the woman’s specific cancer cells.
“Five years ago, it would cost about $25 million for that kind of personalized therapy,” Mr. Hessel said. “Today, it would cost about $2 million.”
Companies trying out personalized medicine have had limited success thus far, and Mr. Hessel has tried to set the initial expectations low.
“The first time through, we will have basically a toy therapeutic,” he said. “It won’t kill the cancer very effectively. But we are out to prove and refine a process.”
Mr. Hessel is convinced that people will succeed with this type of therapy and reduce the cost of personalized cures to the $5,000 range, possibly in a few years. The Pink Army Cooperative was set up to try to make sure the public has access to such cures, should they actually arrive.
People participating in this program will be encouraged to make their genetic data public so that the researchers could gather a large body of information around the breast cancer cells.
The legal questions around personalized medicine are not even close to being answered. But Mr. Hessel has decided to push forward and hope the legal chips fall in his favor.
“We’re looking at a number of things,” Mr. Hessel said. “What if I made the drug for you, but I don’t expressly guarantee it do anything? And, if I am not actually selling anything to you, do I even have to worry about the approval process? These are some of the unanswered questions.”
The group plans to begin sequencing its first patient once it secures $50,000 in donations.
“That’s what it will take to get this rolling,” he said. “That’s when we will start on the open-source viral kernel design.”
Dr. Rob Carlson, the author of “Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life,” has followed the synthetic biology movement closely and said there’s merit behind Mr. Hessel’s ideas.
Mr. Carlson said he did not know enough about the specifics of the Pink Army Cooperative’s plans but agreed that this area of science appears to show great promise and that falling costs for the underlying technology are putting very powerful tools in the hands of entrepreneurs.
“If they’re talking about $50,000 to get going, that seems entirely reasonable to me in terms of an experiment,” Mr. Carlson said. “All of a sudden these types of approaches have become feasible.”
Mr. Carlson added that the synthetic biology movement appears to be following the traditions of past technology movements, where do-it-yourself enthusiasts are pushing the limits of what’s possible.
“It really seems to me that biology will follow along the path of everything else I can find, where this bubbles up from a garage setting one way or another,” he said. “I mean, it could be different from cars, computers and aviation, but I haven’t found any reason to believe it’s different.”
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Would You Pay $20 for Access to a Breast Cancer Cure? - Bits Blog
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