[dnautics]

yes and no.

For example, the trend now is toward maintenance drugs and biologicals, because that's what the execs want. Whether or not this has anything to do with efficacy is questionable. During my biophysics days, I saw so many drugs enter the clinical pipeline even purporting to treat alzheimers, that were basically following up on "popular memes in the field" that from first principles I would look at and say, there's no way this will work.

I've spoken to one pharma consultant (to get the chat, I didn't tell him I was making an unpatented drug) who basically lamented what had happened to the cancer field as the big companies lost their R&D and turned to acquiring biotechs for their blue sky stuff - and he characterized biotechs as being on to "fad-dey" stuff. Now, it's alos possible that he's wrong too, and that I'm on the wrong track. So you are correct to worry about the likelihood of success.

[throwaway_yy2Di]

I don't know how bad pharma politics are, but I have hard time imagining they're worse than crowdfunding! I think no one on this site really understands what you're doing. We know you're more credible than a homeopathic scam artist, which is to our credit because the broader crowdfunding demographic is unlikely to figure out the difference. (See fig. 1, sales of homeopathic remedies in billion USD). But would you trust us to figure out that your compound is more promising than some other one, with similar-looking technical jargon, proposed by similarly credentialed researchers?

I think the concept is incredibly radical. If this were a business idea, it would be functionally illegal: you could only solicit funding from wealthy, accredited investors under highly regulated procedures. Because people are easily mislead. And that's for stupid things like selling sporks. But here we are, pretending to scrutinize a million-dollar medical research grant, as if we were PhDs at the NIH office or something. Where do you want to go with this?

[dnautics]

Is your presupposition that the TLAs are better at this than you are? There's a huge project right now at DARPA (https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=0d71fc7...) that is being led by program manager whose graduate work is increasingly suspected of being completely artefactual. http://raphazlab.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/seven-years-of-ima...