Methuselah Mouse

[Mike Holmes]

Why don't more people participate openly in the mPrize?

Well... have you seen Aubrey de Grey's picture? If not, he's got very long hair, a longer beard, and huge mustachios. His presentation of SENS... their website used to be a disaster. It's a bit better now that it's presented as the Methusela Foundation. But the foundation is like ten people. Maybe. If they're all still involved.

Which all is unfair indictment of the man. But my point is that most people in the gerontology field see him as a whacko. I mean...

HE'S PROPOSING THAT THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH IS OBTAINABLE!

Now, he does so quite sanely, if you read him. But can you imagine any more outlandish a claim. It's such a stretch. Like:

Well, all we have to do is come up with a really good cure for cancer, then come up with several hypotheses as to how to take care of six other problems associated with aging, none of which anyone is working on now really, and voila! No more aging.

He admits that the only way we see anything like this in our lifetimes (or perhaps even our children's lifetimes) is if we start a "Manhattan Project" to accomplish it. The mPrize exists really only to heighten awareness of the project so that everyone suddenly sees the light, and we start to spend a major portion of our GDP each year on this one project.

Basically it's a longshot in about ten different ways. So calling for it is... well the kind would call it visionary. But most folks in his field call it delusions of grandeur. Oh, they agree that this is the end-goal of their field, and that we might get there some century. But they don't agree that his specific plan has any particular merit.

(It's most impressive attribute, in fact, is that it IS a plan. Nobody else has one. )

As such, nobody wants to be associated with him. It's like being associated with a witch-doctor. Despite the fact that he works in gerontology at Cambridge (he's actually something like a "bioinformatician" doing mostly computer database work collecting data), people think of him as "that crazy guy who thinks we can stop aging." It's career seppaku, I'd imagine, to publically buy into his ideas.

Which isn't to say that many people don't buy in on some level. They just can't afford to acknowledge it publically. Which may be short-sighted (I mean what would be better than cheating old-age). But that's human behavior for you. Risk aversion.

He is, at the very least, eccentric. But perhaps that's what you need to come up with big ideas. Tesla was eccentric, too. And we owe him for a lot of astoundingly important developments. And we've yet to achieve many of his visions. Many of which, like broadcast power for instance, are known to be possible (if impractical).

Mike

[MirariNefas]

Because this is even harder than rocket science. Developing, testing, and marketing a new drug costs on average about a billion dollars.

Does it?

How much of that is the CYA regulation put in place after the thalidomide disaster?

Probably a lot. So? Costs are costs.

According to a late friend of mine who worked for Merck, 2/3 to 75% of Pharma expenses are advertising. So how much do the research programs really cost?

Duane

I'd say your friend was exaggerating.

I worked at a pharmaceutical company for a couple of years in a support role. This is a "No product" new start up, La Jolla Pharmaceutical Company, ticker symbol LJCP. They have been working for years to develop a drug treatment for Lupas kidney disease. I bought stock and followed them closely since. They have absolutely nothing to sell. Every year they sell more stock to raise another year's worth of working capital. They raise about $6 million per year. I would estimate that this company has been working for 12 years and are still in the final stages of phase 3 clinical trials. That means $72 million and counting to completely establish the laboratory and supporting facilities, hire staff, do research, hire industry experts for the drug development phases, build manufacturing facility and manufacture production drugs for clinical trial, rent and everything else, for a single product. Of course now they have lines on a couple more products, but they didn't for a long time. So you figure out how much of the cost is one time start up cost, and how much is recurring for each drug development.
My point? A new drug costs less than $50 million if it is successful, and very few go that far then fail. I think $100 million is a very high estimate for the cost of the actual drug development, and $1 billion is a lie.

Your one window of experience has narrowed your field of vision to one drug, and that isn't a good indicator.

really long url

Yes, I rounded up. It was more like $800 million. Why? Because you can't just look at the drugs that make it. You have to look at the vast numbers that do not. At any given phase in development, the majority of candidates are culled.

Drug development is expensive.

[JohnSmith]

His hair (and beard) reminds me of Richard Stallman, actually.
Come to think of it, lots of people in the open source movement look insane.

And sure, developing drugs for humans costs lots. But mice are cheap.

[Jboily]

His hair (and beard) reminds me of Richard Stallman, actually.
Come to think of it, lots of people in the open source movement look insane.

And sure, developing drugs for humans costs lots. But mice are cheap.

David Sinclair (one of the competitors), has probably made more money with his startup company, then he would have made with the “M” prize. He has now a major company drug backing to develop the drug. They raised about $75M on their own to make the preliminary drug development, before to be bought. The main problem they were facing was that the FDA would not approve an anti-aging drug as such, so they are requesting their drug approval for aging related illness like diabetes and Alzheimer. They are getting very encouraging results, see here:( really long url ).

I would think they need to walk a fine line to keep credibility high, to insure funding and drug approval.

[JohnSmith]

I hate to bring a thread back from the dead, but I also dislike starting new ones.

The iGEM 2008 competition has ended recently, and the winners had a pretty cool project.
They basically created a functional designer vaccine against a fairly prolific bacteria, and they did it in a year. No idea how much they spent, but I imagine it was well under the 1 million mark.
Of course, it would still take more refining, and human trials, before it could be used on any kind of scale. But I like the results coming out of iGEM.

Oh, and the Rice University team is making Resveratrol beer.

[kurt9]

I hate to bring a thread back from the dead, but I also dislike starting new ones.

The iGEM 2008 competition has ended recently, and the winners had a pretty cool project.
They basically created a functional designer vaccine against a fairly prolific bacteria, and they did it in a year. No idea how much they spent, but I imagine it was well under the 1 million mark.
Of course, it would still take more refining, and human trials, before it could be used on any kind of scale. But I like the results coming out of iGEM.

Oh, and the Rice University team is making Resveratrol beer.

The next decade will feature the rise of a decentralized bio-hacker culture. I expect the bio-hackers to have the same impact on medicine as the PC and internet has had on computing starting in the late 70's. I do not expect the conventional medical industry to do anything about aging. They are just dysfunctional bureaucracies, just like IBM was when Apple first started. I expect individuals and small groups of individuals outside the medical industry to develop the effective cure for aging in the next few decades.

One of the reasons why I think aging will get cured in the next few decades is that biotechnology instrumentation and capabilities is following a progression rate similar to that of the semiconductor Mooore's Law.

[djolds1]

The next decade will feature the rise of a decentralized bio-hacker culture. I expect the bio-hackers to have the same impact on medicine as the PC and internet has had on computing starting in the late 70's. I do not expect the conventional medical industry to do anything about aging. They are just dysfunctional bureaucracies, just like IBM was when Apple first started. I expect individuals and small groups of individuals outside the medical industry to develop the effective cure for aging in the next few decades.

One of the reasons why I think aging will get cured in the next few decades is that biotechnology instrumentation and capabilities is following a progression rate similar to that of the semiconductor Mooore's Law.

Bio-hacking is going to scare the crap out of the big governments. There's the potential for Armageddon plagues here, like that Aussie Mousepox from a few years back. Of course, there's probably now enough equipment on the market and "lost" to make stopping it impossible. I think I read a few years back that a complete first class genetic engineering lab (DNA synthesizer included) could be assembled for under 10,000 USD. That's "fusor enthusiast" territory. Cheaper now. And when fabbers hit the stage, producing that equipment drops to nil cost and huge availability.

Duane

[djolds1]

According to a late friend of mine who worked for Merck, 2/3 to 75% of Pharma expenses are advertising. So how much do the research programs really cost?

Duane

I'd say your friend was exaggerating.

Brian Burley did not make mistakes of that type.

Duane

[Roger]

Drug development is expensive.

Pharma gets paid good bucks to develop drugs, by the US Government.

[MirariNefas]

I think I read a few years back that a complete first class genetic engineering lab (DNA synthesizer included) could be assembled for under 10,000 USD. That's "fusor enthusiast" territory. Cheaper now. And when fabbers hit the stage, producing that equipment drops to nil cost and huge availability.

This is inaccurate, or at least misleading. I recently worked for a small lab, and handled purchases. A "first class" microplate reader, which we used for checking the purity and concentration of our DNA (though it has other uses), was 30,000 USD alone. * edit: now that I think about it a bit more, top of the line was a little over $60,000, new. The one we got was $23,000, which was quite sufficient for our limited purposes. I had quotes for refurbished ones ranging from $7,000 (with lesser capabilities) to $15,000. And I had a repair quote for a cheap old one that broke starting at $5,500, which I suspect is what you'd end up paying on top of any too-good-to-be-true ebay prices.

On the other hand, I know an engineer who used to repair and refurbish old microplate readers with cheap components and sell them for a hefty profit. Lots of biolab equipment costs more than it could, because the drug companies are big players with deep pockets and the academic labs are backed by grants without a profit motive. So maybe it only takes 10,000 USD in production costs to put a first class lab together. But what you actually pay for it will be much more, even if you go for more modest, refurbished devices (and the industrious among you will note that you can find "microplate reader"s on ebay for much cheaper than 30 or 10K, but that says little about their state or capability, and the inevitable repair costs and delays that would pop up every now and then).

I sometimes wonder if our current system of grants and high profit margins for drug companies is specifically being perpetuated to price out biohackers. It wouldn't surprise me if a few people in power think along these lines anyway.

But I suppose I don't know exactly what your source was defining as a "genetic engineering lab", aside from the fact that it had a DNA synthesizer, so I suppose that a very limited lab that does one thing, like make small genes and stick them into bacterial cells, can be very cheap. Maybe the only thing I should be objecting to is the term "first class" which implies a great deal of capability and safety to me.

Cheap figures for labs also rely on making use of the services of specialized biological industries, like the gene sequencing industry. You no longer need to purchase a great deal of equipment for gene sequencing, because some first rate facilities have largely automated the process (with highly expensive pieces of equipment) and you can send your samples off to them to get it done cheap. Things haven't gotten cheaper for independantly doing this sort of work, but economies of scale have kicked in. Wonderful for a legit lab. But these sort of centralized, integral services provide easy ways for governments to keep tabs on who is doing what, if they choose to do so.

That said, while I'm a naysayer about the imminency of a massive biohacking movement, I agree that means are becoming cheaper, education more widespread, etc. So sooner or later, perhaps.