We are up against a couple number of entrenched public companies like Sigma-Aldrich and Thermo Fisher.
Couple of examples:
Greiner CELLSTAR® serological pipette, 10 mL $27 v. $106.60
http://store.p212121.com/serological-pipettes/
http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/sigma/p7615?lang...
TCEP HCl $89 vs. $365
How about less then 1% from American Cancer Society go to peds Research
How about 4% of Federal dollars for cancer research goes to peds cancer research
Vast majority of organizations give for the care and expenses BUT NOT to fund peds cancer research.
Good organizations: St Baldricks, Children's Cancer Research Foundation, Alex's Lemonade Stand, and other's if they state Research is a certain percentage if not it is pennies to the dollar.
Pediatric cancer is exceptionally rare. The ACS figures[1] for this year estimate 1,350 childhood cancer deaths out of 585,720 total deaths, or 0.2%. The prime driver for cancer research fund allocation is incidence rate. You are far more likely to develop cancer aged 20-40 than you are aged 0-20. 12% of all women will develop invasive breast cancer at some point in their lives.
I am not saying there isn't an argument for increasing pediatric cancer research: the question is whether a disease that has a very low incidence rate should get extra funding at the expense of a disease with a comparatively high one. I don't know the answer, and I don't pretend to. I do think cancer research funding is a very complicated matter, and inevitably one group of people is going to end up angry and upset at the expense of another.
[1]: http://www.cancer.org/research/cancerfactsstatistics/cancerf...
20+ years ZERO new chemotherapy drugs introduced to pediatric cancer treatments. We can do better. TO bad the cancer that killed my son has more research spending for dogs then there is for adults and children of bone cancer. Priorities!
http://masschallenge.org/startups/2014/profile/3derm
3Derm takes 3D pictures of skin with an inexpensive handheld imager to help detect skin cancer at the earlier more treatable stages.
http://masschallenge.org/startups/2014/profile/oncolinx
Oncolinx cancer therapies can target and destroy cancer cells, while sparing healthy tissues—effectively treating the cancer, virtually without any adverse side affects.
There are others that are more general than just cancer.
The complexity of 'erasing cancer' is very much mis-understood, even though it is of course a noble goal.
The biggest issue I think is that cancer is systemic, given a long enough run the way our bodies do their housekeeping cancer is pretty much a 100% certainty. It's like playing the lottery, if you play long enough one day you'll win, only in this case you lose.
By far the larger part of the fatalities in my close circle were due to cancer. And I fear that this will remain with us as a problem for quite a while. Compared to curing cancer curing world hunger seems to be easy (it requires no unknown technology, nor does it go against the way our bodies appear to function).
I think in retrospect that my normal dose of snark, even with the point I was trying to make, was probably not appropriate to the topic at hand. If nothing else it might seem flippant, and while I know that's not what I would mean, that doesn't mean people seeing the comment independently would realize that.
> The complexity of 'erasing cancer' is very much mis-understood, even though it is of course a noble goal.
If I had a do-over that's probably exactly how I would phrase it instead. Saying we should simply cure cancer, as it were always one massive public project away and just needed political will, just demonstrates an immature understanding of cancer research as it stands today.
Certainly it's a noble goal, but it's seemingly at odds with how biology works in a body in the long run.
Regarding biological viruses, your comment seems to assume that all viruses are detrimental to life.
http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/nucle...
The SENS Research Foundation is entirely supported by charitable donations.
If you want something a little less radical then helping any group working on targeted cell killing technologies is more useful than what you were probably going to do with that money otherwise - though of course finding a place to donate that will funnel your funds to this particular research is a challenge. The typical cancer charity is about five levels removed from picking research projects, but one can hope that this will change with the spread of crowdfunding techniques into the sciences. Immune therapies are the front runner technology there, but many other approaches exist (nanoparticles, viruses, bacteria, etc). Some of these approaches seem likely to effectively treat many different types of cancer, such as work on CD47:
http://news.sciencemag.org/health/2012/03/one-drug-shrink-al...
Even if we do it one disease at a time, it'll be worth it.