| Index | Recent Threads | Unanswered Threads | Who's Active | Guidelines | Search |
 |
World Community Grid Forums
Category: Completed Research
Forum: OpenZika
Thread: Question the ethics and legitimacy of this project for BOINC |
| No member browsing this thread |
|
Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 63
|
|
| Author |
|
|
poppageek
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Nov 16, 2004 Post Count: 99 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
I've seen this before. Someone with little to no credit, little to no post count playing the cynical doubter.
IIRC HFCC found 2 new drugs to treat childhood neuroblastoma and was having problems getting a company to produce it as it was not a large enough market. I guess that is better result than someone making money off those drugs. |
||
|
|
poppageek
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Nov 16, 2004 Post Count: 99 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
Just did a count and at present I have 19 cores loaded with Zika work units and 544 Zika in cache. Should have first badge as soon as other cores finish other projects.
Cheers! |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Voicing legitimate concerns and asking for clarification isn't criticism it's asking for clarification - even though on certain key areas nothing was forthcoming. If you're content then good for you, personally I'm out. I think it's safe to say that any project run here looking for disease cures/treatments will eventually have some kind of commercial application if one is found from our efforts. Pharmaceutical companies don't manufacture/distribute for free. If you're against Zika for that reason why are you not also against MCM, UGM, FAHV etc. etc? Lol, I might have been born in the sixites but i'm well aware that we don't live in some hippy counter culture where everythings free, yes you are quite correct, at some point some large Pharma company may benefit from production of a drug potentially based on our efforts - that's the nature of the beast and the reality of bringing cures to people. I'd respectfully ask you to go back and re-read what I said initially, I feel slightly uneasy with the motives of someone who runs a biotech research company (who talk about bridging the gap between research and big business) being involved in a WCG project, especially when I specifically ask when everyone will get access to any potentially useful outcome and it gets roundly ignored, for that reason i'll exercise my right to not be invovled any further. Crunch on. |
||
|
|
Dayle Diamond
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 31, 2013 Post Count: 450 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Thank you for your reply. It was a little weird that this wasn't all disclosed up front but I will also continue my support of your project.
I am still concerned about large corporate interests (many of whom already operate server farms looking into more profitable medical ventures) free riding on our work. They could make the final product available with legal protections built with the assumption that the pharmaceutical company paid for R&D every step of the way. My personal suggestion: go ahead and patent and sell anything you find - just make one of the terms of the sale that the buyer agrees to a price cap and pays it forward. For example, a buyer could be required to rent a server farm to donate the equivalent of the Zika project's FLOPS back to the grid. |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I do not know HFCC, but in my mind that is a tragedy - if the motivation is making money. There has to be a way to bring to patients. One of the companies I co-founded (Phoenix Nest) works on Sanfilippo Sundrome MPS IIID. We know of only 2 patients in the US. We were still able to work with an academic institute, get NIH grant funding to support developing a treatment. We had to have a 12 page commercialization plan . Without that the reviewers would not fund it. So bottom line market size should not be a consideration. If the science is there and the NIH or other group supports it, it can be done. The drug ultimately will not be cheap (several years from clinic at least) to recoup the costs but investment of several million $ can lead to therapeutics, does not need to be billions.
|
||
|
|
PecosRiverM
Veteran Cruncher The Great State of Texas Joined: Apr 27, 2007 Post Count: 1053 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
I'd respectfully ask you to go back and re-read what I said initially, I feel slightly uneasy with the motives of someone who runs a biotech research company (who talk about bridging the gap between research and big business) being involved in a WCG project, especially when I specifically ask when everyone will get access to any potentially useful outcome and it gets roundly ignored, for that reason i'll exercise my right to not be invovled any further. Crunch on. As is your right. I'd like to thank you for the 14+days you have done so far on this project. As for me I see no problem with this. But some do and it is your computer/electricity being used.    |
||
|
|
poppageek
Advanced Cruncher Joined: Nov 16, 2004 Post Count: 99 Status: Offline Project Badges:
|
I do not know HFCC, but in my mind that is a tragedy - if the motivation is making money. There has to be a way to bring to patients. One of the companies I co-founded (Phoenix Nest) works on Sanfilippo Sundrome MPS IIID. We know of only 2 patients in the US. We were still able to work with an academic institute, get NIH grant funding to support developing a treatment. We had to have a 12 page commercialization plan . Without that the reviewers would not fund it. So bottom line market size should not be a consideration. If the science is there and the NIH or other group supports it, it can be done. The drug ultimately will not be cheap (several years from clinic at least) to recoup the costs but investment of several million $ can lead to therapeutics, does not need to be billions. It was some time ago I read that and when I went to find it for you I discovered there was great news! In a previous update, one of the problems we mentioned is that many pharmaceutical companies are not interested in developing drugs for neuroblastoma, because the potential market is relatively small. That’s why we are especially excited to announce that recently, two organizations that support drug development in Japan - the National Institute of Biomedical Innovation (NIBIO) and the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ) - have shown interest in our project of TrkB antagonists as candidate anti-cancer drugs. In addition, the Association Hubert Gouin: Enfance & Cancer, which supports researchers who develop new drugs against high-risk neuroblastoma, is also interested in our TrkB antagonists project. We hope to secure their support for our project in the near future. New research phase will attack more types of childhood cancer Cheers! |
||
|
|
Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I believe I addressed all your comments in my initial post. My bio is short on the WCG page because I do not want to detract from my colleagues who are leading this project. They are the future of science - not me. I would not be volunteering my time unless I thought I could be useful to the them and the team.
|
||
|
|
nanoprobe
Master Cruncher Classified Joined: Aug 29, 2008 Post Count: 2998 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Voicing legitimate concerns and asking for clarification isn't criticism it's asking for clarification - even though on certain key areas nothing was forthcoming. If you're content then good for you, personally I'm out. I think it's safe to say that any project run here looking for disease cures/treatments will eventually have some kind of commercial application if one is found from our efforts. Pharmaceutical companies don't manufacture/distribute for free. If you're against Zika for that reason why are you not also against MCM, UGM, FAHV etc. etc? Lol, I might have been born in the sixites but i'm well aware that we don't live in some hippy counter culture where everythings free, yes you are quite correct, at some point some large Pharma company may benefit from production of a drug potentially based on our efforts - that's the nature of the beast and the reality of bringing cures to people. I'd respectfully ask you to go back and re-read what I said initially, I feel slightly uneasy with the motives of someone who runs a biotech research company (who talk about bridging the gap between research and big business) being involved in a WCG project, especially when I specifically ask when everyone will get access to any potentially useful outcome and it gets roundly ignored, for that reason i'll exercise my right to not be invovled any further. Crunch on. Fair enough but your logic to not run zika and run the others still eludes me even after rereading what you initially said.
In 1969 I took an oath to defend and protect the U S Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Domestic. There was no expiration date.
  |
||
|
|
carolhorta
OpenZika Scientist Joined: Apr 4, 2016 Post Count: 3 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
|
Dear Volunteers,
I am very glad that this came up and we can openly discuss about it here!  In fact, I am the PI of OpenZika project on WCG, I am a Professor of Federal University of Goias, Brazil, and I am very lucky to have two experts on Drug Design and Discovery, like Sean and Alex, with me in this endeavor. You can read more about how we started this on Sean’s blog:(http://www.collabchem.com/2016/05/19/zika-ope...ibm-world-community-grid/) I totally agree with each word Sean pointed out in his rapid and thorough response. Thank you for clarifying all these points, Sean! Indeed, the drug discovery is a complex process that requires the interaction of many interdisciplinary and strategical areas, and if we could do it more openly, we could advance in getting promising results more quickly. From initial discovery to a marketable drug is a long, challenging road. On average, it takes about 10 - 15 years and requires an investment up to US$1 billion. This process is basically divided into two main parts: the discovery – which aims at discovering a new chemical entity, which is an active, potent and safe compound, tested in “in vitro” and “in vivo” animal models. The second stage is the development, in which the clinical trials in humans take place. On average, from more than a million screened molecules only one is investigated in late stage clinical trials and is finally made available for patients. Therefore, no non-profit, academia or government agency can tackle the entire process of putting a new drug on the market without heavy investment from the commercial sector. The use of computational approaches for Drug Design, aka Computer-aided/assisted Drug Design (CADD), such as virtual screening and docking calculations, can accelerate the discovery of novel drug candidates, as it rationalizes compound selection, which reduces the number of drug candidates for experimental evaluation in wet labs. This is our main goal of the OpenZika project: we aim to virtually screen 20 million and up to 90 millions of compounds, commercially available, to select and prioritize those compounds that could interact and inhibit one of the key protein targets on Zika virus. We are committed to releasing all the docking results to the public as soon as we get them (My group at UFG manage the Server and we will make results available), there is no reason to sit on the data. So, anyone interested can advance the development of some of these “potentially or virtually” active compounds into new drugs candidates, by testing them on the virus and advancing on the drug discovery process. Thus, running the OpenZika project on World Community Grid will allow us to accelerate the rate at which we can obtain the results toward an antiviral drug for the Zika virus. By working together and opening our work to the scientific community, many other researchers in the world will also be able to take promising candidates forward, to accelerate progress towards defeating the Zika outbreak. So, if you have any further questions, we will be happy to answer. And, please, support us to try to identify drugs candidates active against Zika virus. We need YOU!  |
||
|
|
|