About Us
From The Cure For The Needy
Contents |
About the Cure for Needy Project
In January 2009, The Cure for Needy Project (CFN) began as a class project in a Rice University course taught by Professor James Tour. While discussing "The World is Flat 3.0" by Thomas Friedman, an idea began to grow. In the book, Friedman illustrates the effectiveness of web-based collaborative projects by including a story about Goldcorp, Inc., based in Toronto. Their CEO challenged the world's geologists to calculate where the mining company could find gold next by giving the teams access to all of their data. As a result, the company found its next gold mine cost effectively and the winning team found itself a new niche in the world market.
Our project stemmed from the same idea. Currently, millions of people around the world suffer from diseases for which an effective treatment already exists. In particular, one sixth of the world's population suffers from one or more tropical diseases. The treatments for many of the rarer medical conditions have been classified as orphan drugs, a designation dependent on country that generally provides incentives to pharmaceutical companies to produce them. However, we believe the synthetic route used for many of these drugs is not cost effective enough for distribution to those afflicted with these diseases, whether many or few. We want to change this.
Our hope is that this website will allow synthetic chemists an open forum to think, collaborate, and exchange ideas on how to synthesize these drugs in a more efficient and cost effective way. We will post small molecule targets that are known to be efficacious and approved for use against the disease in question, so that no further testing is required - only a more efficient synthesis or purification method. In addition, we would like other community members to contribute through discussing other issues limiting the production and distribution of these drugs.
The following two sections will hopefully clarify a little more about The Cure for Needy Project's purpose and goals.
What We Are
- Increasing awareness of these medicines and the conditions they treat
- Building a database of knowledge concerning the synthesis of the targeted drugs
- Working to expand the percentage of the afflicted world with affordable access to treatment
- Promoting the easy sharing of knowledge
- Encouraging discussion on all related problems
What We Are Not
- For profit or any personal benefits other than education
- Trying to come up with new drugs
- Offering medical advice
- Trying to infringe on intellectual property rights - please contact us if there is an issue
- Synthesizing drugs ourselves
Operational Vision
The following is a basic outline of our vision for the running of the website.
- The website would show all the known synthetic routes to each drug and ask for suggestions on shortening the processes or ideas on entirely new routes that are less expensive or more environmentally sound.
- A chemical drawing tool will be associated with the website for submitters to use when drafting their proposed syntheses.
- Other web users would then vet and critique the proposed syntheses, pointing out potential flaws or methods to enhance the efficiencies.
- Users can also contribute by editing and adding data to the drug and disease pages that is useful in developing syntheses or increasing awareness.
- Literature precedent for certain steps can be appended through PDF uploads of patents and literature with narrative comments.
We welcome feedback on ways to improve the site through our contact page or our forums.
Monitoring and Testing
As our site develops, we welcome monitoring by small or large drug companies to insure the validity and effectiveness of the site and syntheses. We hope these companies will input data or even try to prepare the target compounds. It is certainly desirable for a small custom synthesis shop to prepare the drug by a web-posted route because the low-cost synthesis could aid enormously with their visibility as an efficient business of the synthetic trade, thereby garnering more business for itself. This is analogous to the winner of Goldcorp’s competition’s success. Not to mention the humanitarian good producing the drug and distributing it to the needy their efforts could effect.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property (IP) issues are a concern. If a company maintains IP on the target molecule, we welcome them to monitor the site and thereby streamline their synthetic route. If IP property exists, then any other company wishing to practice one of the proposed routes would have to secure proper license from the IP-holder. The web-based contributors would hope that the IP-holder would adjust their royalty priorities or release the IP to promote generosity to the needy. We ask that all synthetic routes posted to the website are licensed under the Creative Commons License with the understanding that they will be used to help those in the developing world.
Future Plans
Furthermore, we would like to open this website to people from other professions, not just synthetic chemists. We want to allow people of all different professions to give their input on how to solve this problem, so that our combined efforts will help the millions of people afflicted with these diseases. As of today, our discussion page contains forums related to distribution and awareness efforts. As the site progresses, we hope to add many new ways for people of all ages and professions to get involved in this life-saving effort.
