| I'm sorry. I think the idea of private funding for research is interesting, but this really seems like a scam. 1. Zero people on the team or among the advisors have any experience doing research in molecular biology or virology.
Check for yourself: http://www.immunityproject.org/ ("Meet the Team")
They have an anesthesiologist, a bioinformatics guy, oncology researcher, epidemiologist (who studied HIV, but mostly from a community medicine perspective - e.g. things like gels and microbicides), 4 marketing/biz people, a media strategist, a general pediatrician, and another marketing person. 2. They have zero publications and no references to even preliminary data. Anyone can say they have "very successful mouse data." If these guys are actually scientists, why don't they talk about their science - their site is 100% marketing jargon. 3. By not going through the NIH, this group is not required to release any information about their technology to the public. 4. It's not trivial to do HIV research. If you are working with the virus, you are required to work in a bio-safety level 3 unit. Do they have approval for this? Is there any reason to think that the FDA will approve their trials? 5. What is this mysterious "final experiment" they need to do before starting the FDA approval process? (https://pledge.immunityproject.org/the-free-hiv-aids-vaccine). It really seems like these guys are just trying to make money from the suffering of others. I find the use of stock images of poor children to be exploitative. Perhaps the NIH is not funding them for a reason. Who would fund someone before they've shown any evidence whatsoever that their technique works. Okay, I'm off to go fundraising for my Malaria Vaccine Initiative with my fantastic preliminary animal model data from my lead marketing anesthesiologist. If the NIH won't fund me before I have data (I just need to do that one first^H^H^H last experiment), maybe random people on the internet who don't know anything about science will. |