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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