Sunday, November 24, 2013

Impatient with NIH, cancer researcher turns to crowdfunding




Dr. Daniel Saltzman says he can prove that bacteria that ordinarily cause food poisoning in people can be modified for use as guided missiles to deliver cancer-killing payloads into tumors.
But he needs $500,000 for some preliminary work, and despite his project’s potential, he’s not holding his breath for funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation’s leading source of biomedical research grants.
So Saltzman has teamed up with an entrepreneur in the television industry and Twin Cities advertising and public relations professionals to make an unusual direct appeal to the public. In the process, he’s helping to bring so-called crowdsourcing to the field of medical research.
“This is very different … and so there has to be a leap of faith’’ for the research to be funded, said Saltzman, surgeon-in-chief at Amplatz Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis and an associate professor at the University of Minnesota.
To convince people of his work’s promise, Saltzman and his partner have built a website branding his research “Project Stealth,” created an eye-catching plush toy to represent the salmonella bacterium, made a video featuring Saltzman and a golden retriever named Buddy, and turned to private fundraising events and crowdfunding avenues like Razoo.com.
Saltzman, who has raised about $32,000 since launching Project Stealth in mid-October, acknowledges that the approach is unusual. But he says that, with federal research funds getting tighter every year, he had little choice.
“The bottom line is, there’s a lot of competition, a lot of labs, and only so much money.”
Saltzman is not the first scientist who turned to public appeals for funding in an era of tight federal research budgets. Over the past decade, inflation has eroded more than 20 percent of the buying power of NIH grants for scientists studying genomics, neurology, cancer, heart disease and countless other health issues. With so many competing projects, NIH has reduced the percentage of requests it has funded.
Such novel fundraising methods raise concerns because they don’t go through the conventional peer-review process, said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. And when they rely on celebrities, as some do, they can draw money for reasons other than scientific merit, he said.
But after reviewing Saltzman’s video at the request of the Star Tribune, Caplan said: “One can always niggle at these things, but it seems fine — [a] strong plea for money but from a very legit research program,” he said in an e-mail. Caplan’s only concern was why the project hadn’t drawn NIH or foundation funding given its promising results in animals.
$250,000 a year
Saltzman has been studying the use of bacteria as a potential way to fight cancer since 1993 and thinks he’s on the verge of a breakthrough. He says he needs about $250,000 a year for two years to develop the data required to convince the Food and Drug Administration to authorize human testing. If approved, he said, the U has committed to pay for the $800,000 it would take to run the “phase 1” trial in humans.
Although the U provides researchers with expensive tools like electron microscopes and a fertile environment for the exchange of ideas, Saltzman said, “They give you a room and they turn on the lights. They charge rent for the room. But every lab and every … principal investigator is basically charged with raising their own funds to do research.”
The idea of crowdfunding Saltzmans’ work came from Max Duckler, a semiretired entrepreneur who in 1993 founded CaptionMax, a closed-captioning service for television. Duckler has a degree in biology and a lifelong fascination with medicine. He attended a fundraiser where he bid to spend a day with a surgeon. He won, shadowed Saltzman on six surgeries, and learned about the cancer research.
Duckler said he was disturbed to find that Saltzman and his lab workers were worried whether they could afford to spend $600 to buy special research mice.
“Six hundred dollars and you have to ask whether you can afford it? This is not good,” Duckler said.
A medical advertising firm called StoneArch and a public relations firm named PineappleRM donated their services to publicize Saltzman’s work, and the Twin Cities office of BusinessWire distributed the news release at no charge.
In the marketing video, Saltzman describes how the engineered salmonella penetrate a tumor and activate the body’s immune system to destroy it. “We have tested this therapy in over 4,000 mice. In addition, in small pilot studies in humans and dogs with cancer, we have not seen any side effects at all. Can you imagine a cancer treatment without side effects, whatsoever?”
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 http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/233176591.html