Science, Not The Market, Will Decide

Today's New York Times brought another one of those hyped, early-stage science stories that I hate. Any editor with half a brain should have told the reporter that (s)he only had half a story, and needed to do a bit more reporting.

This one involved a young Harvard researcher named Darren Higgins who is searching for vaccines using a new, proprietary technology for identifying pathogenic proteins that could "speed up the time it takes to discover vaccine candidates."

Of course, then vaccine developers would have to do what has already been done for Heptatis B and cervical cancer (Gardisil). The vaccine manufacturer expresses pathogenic protein targets in bulk, then sticks them in a vaccine to generate immune responses that wouldn't otherwise be generated because the target protein was inside the host's cells. Or, the pathogenic protein was expressed in such minute quantities by the invader that the immune system never noticed it.

Everyone pursuing vaccines today is using this technological approach since all the vaccines that could be done by injecting dead or attenuated pathogens already exist. Smallpox, polio, measles, chicken pox, mumps, etc. etc. were the low-hanging fruit of the vaccine revolution. Now we're on to the tough nuts.

But instead of a discussion about the scientific difficulty in identifying proteins that would make suitable vaccine targets, the story suggested that:

In 2006, the market gave him some validation. In two separate rounds of financing, venture capitalists invested about $5 million in Genocea (Higgins' start-up firm), giving the company seed money for two to three years of development. The company has about 15 full-time employees, and has begun applying its technology to numerous diseases to try to discover their immune-system-provoking proteins. (For competitive reasons, the company declined to say which diseases it is researching.)

I checked the Patent and Trademark Office for any patents, either granted or pending, in either Higgins' or Genocea's names. Nothing came up. What I did find (in the National Institutes of Health database) was that Higgins and Harvard have received two major National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grants for research in this field.

I wish Higgins well in his quest. As Anthony Fauci, head of NIAID and funder pf Higgins' pre-clinical work pointed out in the story, vaccine research is indeed undergoing a renaissance as scientists pursue biotech-derived protein vaccines for a number of diseases, including many neglected diseases that affect the developing world like malaria and hookworm. But the road is long and tough, and I suspect those scientists that make the greatest progress will be the ones that share their setbacks and triumphs with other researchers in the field, not the ones that try to put a proprietary stranglehold on the research tools needed to do the work.

Posted by gooznews at May 16, 2007 05:43 PM