The Stalwart: What We Need is 100,000 Jonas Salks

We've been discussing lately the future of healthcare, and the role that technology and new institutions can play in getting us out of our mess. Given that many see a looming financial catastrophe brought on by an aging population and skyrocketing entitlements, there is a growing sense of urgency in tackling this calamitous mess.

Fred Wilson's is intrigued by things happening on the IT side of the equation:

Yesterday I attended a really great event put on by Esther Dyson's Release 1.0. It was called the Personal Health Information Workshop and it featured a bunch of interesting people and companies working on the problem of unleashing medical data so that it can be used by consumers and physicians to improve our collective health and reduce the costs of providing health care.

I came away from the event convinced that we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way medical information is collected, shared, and used that will mirror the revolutions we have witnessed in financial and marketing data.

That's awesome, and there's no doubt that improving the flow of information, and getting rid of the mountains of illegible paperwork at the Doctor's office would be an important step towards reducing costs. Fred, a venture capitalist, is looking for deals in the medical-data space, and I don't doubt that this should be quite lucrative.

Given how complex and problematic the whole healthcare industry is, young entrepreneurs should be licking their chops at the prospect of attacking this industry. I await the healthcare equivalent of the tech-renaissance in the late 70's when a bunch of college dropouts descended upon garages in California to start building the future.

With little precedent and no roadmaps, that group shared a radical DIY ethos in their quest. Up until now, medicine's been different. The up-front costs associated with developing new products, require scientists are researchers to work within the pharma/university setting. At every stage of the process, procedures and regulations make it impossible to turn your garage into a lab.

But that is beginning to change. Here's an article from May on Wired.com:

The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can't afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months - the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.

Here's some more from a bio-informatics blog:

I've stumbled across a couple of websites in the last six months devoted to biohacking - hobbyists tinkering with genetically modifying organisms in their toolsheds. I haven't seen any actual examples - there doesn't seem to be a biohacker equivalent to hackaday - though I do faintly remember a team from my university getting together to take part in some sort of biohacking competition that used parts from MIT's BioBricks program, so it's not that new a concept. The idea behind BioBricks, if you haven't heard of it, is to:
Isolate discrete biomolecular mechanisms and define standard interfaces for them so that they can be assembled in much the same way as electronic circuits.

I had seen the Wired article back in my, and while I found it interesting, I had trouble seeing how a garage bio-hacker could ever make the leap from a new discovery done in a homemade lab to a functioning product. After all, you can't just run clinical trials on your friends out of your garage.

But perhaps you can run a trial out of your garage. One of the great medical discoveries of all time was Jonas Salk's polio vaccine He worked somewhat outside of the medical establishment, and when he was confident that he had developed a working vaccine he ran the equivalent of early-phase safety testing on himself and his family.

With advanced biotechnology and genomics, ~~scientists~~ hackers may be able to regularly develop products with the Jonas Salk's confidence. Of course, actual production will be difficult, but then pill foundries will spring up to serve them. Just send the schematics to your compound, and then they'll send you back your drugs.

Without a doubt, there would be serious regulatory barriers to this kind of drug development, and I don't expect the government to be on the ball in anticipating the necessary changes. But if 100,000 Jonas Salks retreat to their garages to solve some of the worlds toughest problems, the healthcare landscape will be radically altered, and there will be great opportunities for advance.

What is This?

The Stalwart is a blog written by Joseph Weisenthal, covering such topics as stocks, business, economics, politics, technology, gambling, chess, poker, economics, current events, music, math, Chinese food, science, randomness, kurtosis, sports, evolutionary fitness, and anything else of the author's choosing. The words contained herein are the author's own, not affiliated with any other firm or employer.

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