Alternative Funding for Drug Development

Can Mobile Applications aid in Drug Development?

We live in a time of unprecedented advances in biological science and technology. At the same time, in many potential areas of drug development, major drug companies have substantially reduced their investment in research and new product development. In many respects, the broad field of neuroscience has become a kind of poster child for underinvestment by a number of large pharmaceutical companies.  By default, these companies have delegated early-stage drug development to small, underfunded biotech firms. The latter often emerge from the laboratories of university-based neuroscientists; but, they lack the management and real world business skills essential to their present and future profitability.

At some level, one of the key barriers to early product development is the cultural gap between academics and the worlds of investment capital and big Pharma. As C.P. Snow pointed out in an earlier era (“The Two Cultures”), the worlds of science and its potential applications speak in very different languages. Indeed scientists often operate in their own silos’ (e.g. they rarely communicate outside of their own fields).

It may be time to start thinking of alternative ways to fund biotech startups. Crowd funding sites such as Kickstarter have been successful in funding a number of other businesses, but are rarely applied to biotech companies. This is likely because biotechs require an extremely large investment to make it through the "valley of death" i.e. from a novel molecular target to clinical trials. But what if there was an application that a) allowed scientists to grade potential drugs, and b) allowed the public to invest early on in the life cycle of the company? In this way, the public could be involved (and perhaps own early 'stock') in funding certain diseases/approaches and scientists could have more access to early stage work, potentially quickening the pace of drug development.