biols

Yes!! I and my colleagues and probably everyone I went to graduate school with would love a resource like that. I'd be happy to help promote and/or contribute articles / papers I'm reading

Side question: does anybody know of a Hacker News type aggregator for biotech which isn't fuddy-duddy or paid? Sites like STAT+ and Fierce Biotech usually feel more focused on business concerns ("Company X just got $Y in their series A") and less about questions like the one this author is writing about ("how can we work to decentralize pharmaceutical research?"). I'm very interested in these topics and ideas, though not necessarily in Web 3.0

I work as a computational biologist in the pharmaceuticals industry, and I can absolutely vouch for the idea that centralization of resources is a massive problem. Pharma companies have to build extremely redundant infrastructure (vivariums, lab space, etc.), and buy equipment that often goes underutilized, in order to repeat experiments that other companies have already completed but not published. From the computational perspective, teams suffer greatly from "not invented here syndrome," and spend massive engineering and technical effort to re-implement YET ANOTHER RNA-seq processing pipeline.

If we, as a field, want to maximize our impact upon the largest patient population possible, we need to develop a decentralized system to do science. If there was a way to publish intermediate results (e.g. "we tried to see if this drug fixes kidney fibrosis and it seems to sort of work"), and subsequently get credit for that finding's role in the creation of a drug down the line, we could massively reduce the amount of experimental redundancy that plagues the field today. I'm not sure if that solution is via a blockchain or not, but I think that vision would yield a better system.

Putting "gay-everything in your face at every corner" next to "obvious hard core drug abuse on the sidewalks" could be misconstrued as homophobic, which I hope wasn't your intention, especially during pride month.

I'd be very happy to participate in those type of projects. One could even imagine that pharma companies could be _mandated_ to spend a certain number of people-hours on R&D in a research collaborative.

I agree that the system is just "reality" right now. I think the idea of a cryptographic data commons is an interesting idea, I'm just trying to imagine how it'd play out in my day-to-day research. If a system would tell me that my hypothesis is correct, but I couldn't look at (and share with colleagues) the raw data being computed, it'd be tough to believe that system. Maybe there's some type of zero-knowledge proof system that could facilitate this, though.

I only have a rudimentary understanding of blockchain technologies, but a system where pieces of a research puzzle are stored on chain and each user can claim ownership of those findings, a resultant drug's profits could be proportionally split by every entity which contributed to the research.

Another idea would be to completely socialize all biopharmaceutical research, but that type of system would require an extremely radical societal shift.

I think the idea would have been that Pfizer and Moderna could have pooled resources and made a single optimal vaccine faster, though I'll admit I'm not sure it could have happened any faster than it did from my perspective.

The Kefauver Harris Amendment you refer to was immensely important towards the development of safe and efficacious drugs -- I do not see the connection between that act and rare disease therapeutic development. In fact, drugs that only offer marginal improvements in quality of life for rare genetic disease patients are often fast-tracked by the FDA. Requiring that a drug _works_ shouldn't inhibit drug development. Otherwise, we end up with tragedies like what happened with the use of thalidomide, which prompted this amendment in the first place.

The Broad Institute hosts a very interesting transcriptomic dataset called CMap [1] that was intended to facilitate rapid drug repurposing. Having studied this dataset and worked with the data generators and software teams, I can say that drug repurposing is NOT as straightforward as people think. However, I agree that as a strategy drug repurposing is a useful tool in the arsenal generally.

[1] https://clue.io

This is what I'd like to see. There should be some kind of system where in-progress research being done by pharma companies can be published. This would reduce the massively redundant amount of studies (e.g. CRISPR screens, xenograft studies, etc.) and help scientists more quickly converge on the mechanistic underpinnings of disease and how best to address them therapeutically.

Obviously this can't work in the current pharma industry configuration; what financial incentive is there for big pharma companies to publish their results for another company to beat them to a new drug? I don't have a solution to this problem, but I hope someday we as a society can find one. This would absolutely revolutionize biopharmaceutical science.

Major pharma companies are all constantly competing, and very often are duplicating work because they are not sharing major experimental results. The way it feels is that there's already "too many people" working in certain areas (e.g. in cancer), while almost no attention is paid to these rare diseases.

I think that more people studying rare diseases would result in a net gain of lives saved; I don't think it's as zero-sum as "either 1 person's life is saved or 10 are" in this instance.

Research also cross pollinates across disease areas. For example, understanding altered metabolism in cancer can yield insights for non-oncological metabolic disorders. Oftentimes, though, nobody's working on translating that work out of a cancer model, because the financial incentives are not there.

I work at a medium-sized pharmaceutical company as a computational biologist. Diseases like KS sometimes come up as potential repurposing targets (or novel drug targets), but we get a LOT of pushback from finance / leadership because we're unlikely to turn a profit working on ultra-rare indications.

It is a deeply frustrating position to be in, wanting to work on these rare diseases and help this rarified patient population and not being able to, even though me and my colleagues are poised to do so. I often get maligned for being a scientist in pharma; laypeople often assert that I "don't want to treat cancer / rare genetic disease / etc; because then I'd be out of business." I can assure those reading that all of us DESPERATELY would like to work in these indications, and often times it's tragically finance that dictates whether we are able to or not. The system feels broken.

There's the 20/20/20 rule (every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds) that's cited often.

I started to have similar issues, and my optometrist set me up with some reading glasses optimized for how far away I usually sit from my monitor. They have eliminated a lot of the eyestrain issues I'd been dealing with.