After our meeting at the ranch things began to pick up. I had gone a few months without really doing much other than listening to my father talk about the project. Now we actually had a cohesive plan that I was playing a much larger role in than I had anticipated.
First though, a little background. In my last entry I mentioned that four companies had tried to move forward with the development of MSF, and three of them had disbanded before they even began tieing up the patent for over a decade. The last one was a notable exception. Created by a Spanish man who's family had made its money in the pharmaceutical industry, he had chosen to part ways with them and take up Dr. Moss' project, funded entirely with his own money. He created a company partnered with a Spain-born doctor at El Paso for the express purpose of pushing Dr. Moss' anti-dementia drug through phase 3 clinical trials. Spending several million from his own personal funds he got the first FDA compliant trial run in Germany, proving MSF to be safe for short term use in humans. While this study was eleven years after Dr. Moss' original study in Mexico proving both safety and efficacy, this one was necessary nonetheless because it was run according to FDA requirements. Completed in 2011, Dr. Moss had to finish the final touches on the paper for publication in the British Journal of Pharmacology. Unfortunately with the patent set to expire in 2015, this brand new company couldn't guarantee investors the exclusive marketing rights they'd need to make the potentially hundred million dollar investment needed to put the drug through the final two trials. Without this guarantee, no money could be raised and the project was virtually abandoned.
Now we wanted to start a new effort to fund it without private investment. A safety trial had been done, but we didn't technically have access to the data (though we knew the results of it thanks to Dr. Moss). Furthermore the patent, though virtually useless by 2012, was still held by the company that had run the trial. Now in El Paso we had three days to finish the following: 1. Help Dr. Moss edit and submit his portion of the Phase 1 Trial for publication in early 2013. 2. Help him edit and publish his memoirs on the anti-dementia drug development which were to be the focal point of our crowdfunding efforts. 3. Meet with the University of El Paso and see if we couldn't get them to declare the patent abandoned so that we could purchase it from them (we didn't think we needed it since it would be expired by the time we planned to market any of the drug, but it's best to be on the safe side.) 4. Find someone to develop an easy to apply dementia test which would be used in the trials to establish the drug's efficacy over existing treatments. 5. Meet with the co-president of our predecessor to see if we couldn't get her help and advice on how to proceed. 6. Eat steak (We were in Texas, this should be appended to any Texas related to-do list).
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