It’s 2014 and we have all heard of crowdfunding. Popular platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter have been used to promote creative ventures, each of them attracting millions of unique users a month with total funds raised reaching 9 figures. If you think about the kinds of causes that you see online, they likely range from socially minded causes (Save the whales! Build a school in India!) to creative expression (Rescue my interpretive dance company! Help us make a documentary about going to Burning Man!) and eccentric economic ventures (a hat that collects weather data in realtime).
Not only are the campaigns far reaching, but crowd-funding is used by some well known names. Zach Braff, Spike Lee and Amanda Palmer have all turned to crowd funding to launch projects. But when was the last time you watched a Kickstarter video raising money for medical research funding? Did you send $5 to fund research about a cancer-eating virus , or contribute part of your paycheque to this help this effort that uses stem-cells to repair the brains of MS patients?
Traditionally medical and especially pharmaceutical research is funded primarily by the public sector (taxes and government) and private biotechnology companies that stand to benefit from their sales. UBC’s Larry Lynd and Nick Dragojlovic recently published a paper on the efficacy of crowdfunding in drug development. They analyzed data from 125 different campaigns that each had raised at least 1% of their goal. Many of the campaigns were focused on cancer research, while others featured orphan drugs for rare diseases. The conclusions? Crowdfunding is a “viable approach to supporting early proof-of-concept research”.
Besides the money raised through the platform, a successful crowd funding campaign may improve the chances of additional funding from grants and wealthy, private donors. This paper has been featured in the National Post, and is making some people think differently.
We think a crowd-funding approach makes drug R&D seem a little less academic and distant. We love this grassroots, participatory approach that changes the traditional drug development pipelines and bypasses the hesitation of pharmaceutical companies to fund expensive trials on high risk research that don’t promise large financial returns (as in rare diseases, or treatments that can’t be patented).
While this study suggests that orphan drugs won’t attract as much attention as cancer cures due to the smaller population affected, it may still offer orphan drug research some relief. We’re hopeful that this is one way to improve access to affordable medicine. Dr. Larry Lynd of UBC is also working on a new project with the School of Journalism called Million Dollar Meds, focusing on the outrageously priced orphan drugs that treat rare diseases and the impact these prices have on affected families.
