May 02, 2006

malaria project this summer

I went to see Wai Yim's business plan competition MoshPitt Finals last Thursday. It was a really interesting showing.

I really would liked to have seen the business plans from all the groups. The group that won was ResRx Pharmaceuticals. There are 11,000 drugs out there right now. What they proposed was academic institutions screen these drugs to find new uses. Their method was to outsource this testing to facilities that specialized in certain diseases, to most efficiently screen for the drugs. I'm not sure how much this costs, but it seems like you're basically leveraging the academia's research grants to fund a private enterprise.