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The Pink Army : It is time for a revolution
The challenge of the Pink Army cooperative : Creating faster and cheaper individualized therapies for breast cancer based on synthetic biology through open-source development.
Despite huge research investments, breast cancer remains the leading cancer affecting women in North America. Because current cancer therapies are not successful, the new member-owned and not-for-profit Pink Army cooperative is reconsidering how to treat cancers.
The actual pipeline funnels potential drug candidates through and increasingly stringent set of filters and validation criteria to identify the safest, most effective compound for a given condition. For economic reasons, most drug developers can advance only a single lead molecule through the pipeline and finally most candidate molecule fail. Unfortunately, this increasingly timeframe prevents drug development to keep pace with research: drugs are obsolete before they are sold for the first time.
Pink Army proposes an alternative drug development pipeline providing safe, effective and affordable personalized medicines. Based on cooperative business model and built on open source and automation, Pink Army will operate as a "virtual" biotechnology company, collecting feedback and data, funding research grants, developping database and collaborative tools.
The company will use synthetic biology, a new genomic technology relying on computer-aided DNA design and automated DNA synthesis, allowing lower costs at higher speed. Oncolytic viruses are a new addition to the cancer therapeutic arsenal, non-harmful to normal cells but able to replicate in cancer cells. The synthetic biology has not yet been applied to viral engineering, but Pink Army proposes to develop this technology to engineer oncolytic viruses and to eventually create a single-use drug.
To achieve its goals, Pink Army needs to define a truth-based communication strategy, seeking recognition and support of scientists, medias, social networking tools, politics and public, operating in a near-complete transparency to limite risk of legal action. Despite this unconventional approach, Pink Army aspires to become a strong and confident voice for change in cancer medicine.
More information at http://pinkarmy.org/
