Reinventing the drug discovery wih synthetic biology
Andrew Hessel talks about his initiative the Pink Army Collective (PAC), a company inspired from principle and success of open source movements such as Apache and Linux. If it works PAC will bring fundamental change to the way drugs are developed and, in the process, make faster, better and cheaper drugs. In early stage company will develop personalised synthetic therapeutics for breast cancer and
The core technology is synthetic biology, a platform for high-speed genetic engineering. An open source therapeutic design engine is coupled with automated DNA synthesis and personal-scale manufacturing processes to make person-specific bio-medicines.cooperative. Each synthetic therapeutic will be rigorously tested, openly reviewed, submitted to the FDA for approval, and used only in the person for which was designed, resulting in a single person (n=1) clinical trial. Personalized treatments are expected to be specific, safe, and available for use clinically much faster than those made with traditional development techniques — a revolution in personalized medicine.
But will it work? Well Andrew Hessel asked the same question to himself
There is no public route for drug development; virtually all development is industry-backed. I wondered, if open-source software could effectively challenge multibillion-dollar software franchises, could scientists and drug developers work cooperatively to compete with a product from a big pharmaceutical company? To my mind, breast cancer therapies were the obvious choice, since many people already give time and money toward finding a cure.
and in fact he is very much convinced that it’s possible even though in the short term he don’t see open-source and cooperative model having any large impact on the drug development process. Overall, the whole timeline (anticipated outcome around 2020) depends on several factors, for instance massive digitalisation of biology is one of them. According to Andrew,
as biology becomes more digital, there is potential for massive change. Open access will make it easier to share ideas, publish protocols and tools, verify results, firewall bad designs, communicate best practices, and more. Individualised medicine development will be built on this open foundation, which will only help developers be more successful and lower risk.
6 Responses to “Reinventing the drug discovery wih synthetic biology”
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Reinventing the drug discovery wih synthetic biology- by Fisheye …: Andrew Hessel talks about his initiative the Pink http://url4.eu/136Ox
Being able to design a therapeutic at this level for a person (or even for groups of people) is way in the realm of science fiction — remember, a huge number of genes & proteins are still labeled “here there be dragons”. We don’t come anywhere near understanding a single role for many proteins, let alone the multiple roles they surely have — let alone what roles they might have in a cancer cell with a severely deranged genome & quite off-kilter proteomic & metabolic state.
It is telling that these sorts of visions always come from people who have no experience with real drug development. Trust me: I once had them too.
I could not agree more except that we have to give some room for these ideas and visions irrespective of their practical feasibility.