Boilerplate Disclaimer: These entries are retroactive, and meant to remind me about events of the last 15 months of my life. For a full(er) explanation see my first entry.
I remember the summer of 2012 mostly because I was just finishing up my biology degree. I was supposed to be done in the Winter Term of 2012, but I had mismanaged my classes and ended up not taking a lab section that turned out to be only offered during Fall Term. Since I was already stuck taking a lab section fall term, I figured I might as well shuffle another lab section to summer term to make Winter Term a little easier.
I didn’t regret my decision in the least. It was a really lovely summer and the microbiology lab section I’d opted to take was well within walking distance of my house. Campus is always gorgeous in the summer, and lab sections tend to be a lot more social than standard classes so I was honestly enjoying it. I’ve never considered myself that proficient at lab work, particularly when they involve actual organisms rather than just chemical compounds, but I was pleasantly surprised at how few of the pitfalls I fell into in comparison to some of my lab mates. I didn’t accidentally burn my all the bacteria on my smear plates to death, and managed to get good dilutions the whole year through on my first try.
It short, I was having fun with the second to last college course I would ever take.
It was sometime during this period that my father approached me. I’ve been working at his biotech company off and on since I was sixteen, and I had been fairly involved in production of his research reagents for the last eight. He makes his money off of custom antisense sequences used to study genes by researchers all over the world. He’s only a little involved in this aspect of the business though, as his primary area of interest was curing cancer using selectively delivered radioisotopes specifically to tumors. Imagine chemotherapy where the radiation is applied only to the cancerous areas of the body. Unlike normal chemo, this would be safe enough so that you can actually give the patients a dose that will cure them instead of just sending the cancer into remission. He actually got something working in vitro, but in vivo the delivery mechanism he attached to the isotopes kept binding to the serum albumin in the blood. Needless to say it never reached its end destination.
What he wanted to talk to me had nothing to do with this (for once).
The story he told me I had heard pieces of before: He met a friend from high school at a class reunion who had gone off to develop an anti-dementia treatment that not only reduced dementia levels in people with Alzheimer’s, but also returned much of their memory for a time. While he had managed to get extensive funding for rat, mouse and monkey studies, he was having trouble raising the money for human studies. Ultimately he managed to get a $50,000 dollar grant from a local Alzheimer’s group in El Paso, took it down to Mexico and hooked up with a doctor down there that helped him put together a Phase 1 and 2 clinical trial on 15 Alzheimer’s patients. Just in case you don’t know much about the costs of running clinical trials, this would be roughly analogous to taking a trip around the world on $100. Needless to say there was some extensive reliance on volunteer work and ‘friends of a friend’ coming out of the woodwork to help make this happen.
The end result was worth it though. The compound was a spectacular success, dwarfing the effects of even the most modern treatment on the market today (not that this is actually much of a feat). People in late stages of Alzheimer’s were getting up to dress themselves, remembering conversations and events from the day previous. One man, an ex-government official who had gotten removed from office after he was declared incompetent, went to court to have his competency restored successfully.
Three people went on to get a compassionate use exemption to continue using the drug which allowed Dr. Moss to collect some data as to its long term effects. As was expected, the compound didn’t slow the progression of the disease, but did continue to counteract its effects for another eighteen months. By comparison, the best drug available in today’s marketplace has a comparable effect for one and a half months.
The trial was published in Alzheimer’s Disease and Associated Disorders in 1999. Since then four companies have tried to take the drug to market, but the first three ended up filing bankruptcy before they even started. Each of these three cost years off the life of the patent. The fourth? I’ll talk about them later. We ended up sitting down with one of their executives for a long talk.
The patent was pretty much expired over the course of the four company’s attempts at raising money for the clinical trials through traditional means. This meant that there wouldn’t be any venture capital because we couldn’t give investors much of a profit margin. We’d lose exclusivity by the time we had it approved by the FDA.
Dad’s plan? To use a kickstarter type campaign to get money from the general populace to finish developing the drug. His rationale was that roughly 5 million people in the US alone are affected by this disease. If we could get an average of $10 each from them that would be enough to finish the remaining trials the FDA needed. He wanted my help to get this set up. Of course this was huge to me. Dad’s been working on curing or treating various diseases from HIV to Cancer to Old Age (yes, that’s a disease. I’ll explain that a bit later) since I was born, but other than some good data in dogs for Muscular Dystrophy he’s never actually had anything ready for patients. The idea of working on a treatment that had already been tested in humans was huge to me. Plus what could he possibly need from me? The science was done and all he wanted was some help with getting a crowdfunding project up. I’d just need to introduce him to some of the technology, maybe show him some successful campaigns and perhaps help him advertise it a bit. Simple as pie, right?
So of course I said yes.
That’s ironic foreshadowing right there if you’re curious. I can do that because it’s a retroactive diary rather than a real time one.
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