Thoughts on our project

As described in the presentation and results part of our wiki, our project involves in vivo tests on mice and in vitro tests with yeasts and mammalian cells. Before we started, we realized an overview of the animal experimentation and the use of the mammalian cells in laboratory. The “national charter on ethical animal experimentation” was decreed on the January 20th, 2009, which has constituted the starting point of our reflection.

The article 6 of the ethical charter, in association with the article R214-117 to 121 of the French rural code and Bioethics treaty of Emmanuel Hirsch, allow the definition of the following three major moral axes:

- This experimentation is justified (Adequacy between scientific model and the specie chosen)

- Using animals is justified (absence of alternate methods)

- A reasonable number of animals used and minimal distress

Taken together these points have participated to design and optimize our experimental project. Our Human practice project focused on the participatory science and alternative funding. In this context we assisted at the “night science” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (CRI) on the 10th and 11th july. http://cri-paris.org/nightscience-2015/program/.

Funding innovative drug development

Despite the many promising recent breakthroughs that have occured in biomedicine and biological sciences to find treatments for medical conditions which have been confounded by conventional medicine, the majority of medicines under development never make it to the market. 

So as our yeast immunotherapy iGEM project came along and we were getting encouraging results, we started thinking about the real chance it standed in being developped in latter stages, ultimately commercialized and used in cancer therapy. Indeed, drug development is very expensive and represents a big and risky investment for pharmaceutical industries. On the society point of view the pharmaceutical companies awake some fantasies and anxieties. Indeed, the feelings to be face to powerful companies, which are almost “deshumanizing”, raise some collective fears. This report aims to understand how the citizen can take part to the medical research and do a situational analysis of research. In order to better understand the matter, we first investigated why drug development represented a risky investment, then we looked at today’s available funding options and took particular interest in the emergence of crowdfunding solutions, consistent within the new preoccupation of our modern societies, as patients associations develop to request new treatments and have a say in this industry.