[Gatsky]

I think the negative comments on here have got it upside down. I research and treat cancer, and I think this is great. The fact that it costs billions to develop a drug is why we should support novel pathways of organising drug development, rather than disparaging it.

It may not really be obvious from the outside, but there is a coming crisis in that we won't as a society be able to afford new cancer drugs. It is regularly reported that new drugs which are typically priced around US$120k per year (for multiple years in some cases) are not cost effective. Case in point: crizotonib. This is a drug that works very well at shrinking tumours and controlling disease in incurable lung cancer. It is targeted - it only works if your tumour has a particular gene fusion, which occurs in about 4% of lung cancer patients. It is well tolerated compared to chemotherapy. It's the kind of personalised medicine we are hoping to achieve more broadly in the future. And the way it is priced isn't cost effective [1].

I can guarantee you that the coming surge in immunotherapies will be exorbitantly priced. And these are drugs we will be giving not to 4% of cancer patients, but > 50% of advanced cancer patients in a given tumour type.

These problems are even worse in countries where the government pays for drugs, because they are far more restricted in what they can afford. Patients just end up missing out. And if you think having cancer is bad enough, knowing there is a drug that might help and not being able to afford it is just heart breaking.

So good luck to them, I hope they can draw some money away from nonsense like crowd funding potato salad.

[1] http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/early/2014/02/24/JCO.2013.53...