Industry vs. academic/gov research
TL;DR there are no more Bell labs. Academic and government agency research is vital for the advancement of science and technology.
This is a partial dialog with Rajini Rao about my personal experience with industry lead or influenced research vs. academic or government research. (Too lazy to write a fresh post). I left the blood substitute field and learned medical imaging because of the state of research for blood substitutes. Blood substitute is a convenient name, just like artificial blood; it’s not really meant to replace whole blood. The research is really about Hemoglobin Based Oxygen Carriers or HBOC. People tried perfluorocarbons but it’s not allosteric like Hb. So you need a lot of oxygen which can be a fire hazard and it causes other issues. Some of the surfactants cause allergies in some people. So the field’s focus is on Hb. Free Hb falls apart and clogs up the kidneys. So Baxter Healthcare and others tried to cross link Hb to keep it as a tetramer. It turns out, that’s not enough. So people, like me, tried polymerizing Hb. I left the field before finding out if any of the large molecular weight formulations had other problems. I suspect there are still other issues since nothing is on the market yet. Oh, and NIH and DoD basically stopped funding research in this area.
Baxter Healthcare’s Hemassist failed clinical trial. There were several preclinical studies showing that it didn’t really work using the same compound made by the Army. Baxter claimed it was not the same formulation and proceeded with the clinical trial. Several patients died, prompting Baxter to halt the trial prematurely. I suspect that some of the people doing research with Baxter did not publish the negative results prominently enough.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2728196/
From this review: “The study also criticizes the lack of timely data put forth by the companies and the lack of published studies. Both Hemopure and Polyheme published studies only several years after the completion of their trials. Additionally, unpublished studies render a thorough IRB review of trials difficult. Natanson et al. argue for the timely and complete disclosure of data to the scientific community to avoid exposing the public to unnecessary risks.”
From Rajini Rao: Oh I see, thanks. Interesting problem. It’s more about protein engineering of Hb to make it both efficient and stable as well as nontoxic. The little red cell does a good job of that.
The RBC could be fodder for the intelligent design folks. Well except for sickle cell. I’ve said in other threads when conservatives say that private industry can do better than government funded research such as NIH, NSF, or NASA, just look at Baxter, they are a huge company that dumped millions into to blood substitute research. What happened? People died in clinical trials and we still don’t have a product. The other startups have either failed or have stalled. The difference is private industry has to answer to shareholders and they don’t have to know why or how something works. They just have to find something that works. Academic research aims to find out why and how something works so that we can do it better in the future. So yea, without government funding, we haven’t been able to do better than RBCs.
A less personal example is in today’s Chicago Tribune.
TL;DR The flame retardant industry misused and misquoted research to say that flame retardants have a 15-fold increase in “escape time”. The author of one of the papers says “The fire just laughs at it”.
#scienceeveryday
May 9, 2012
Rajini Rao I know you’re busy but did you see the quote at the end, regarding flame retardant research: The fire just laughs at it.
I wonder if Koen De Paus has any comments on this post. It has some similarities to his post, i.e., promoting science.
May 9, 2012
Chad Haney , I’m shocked that a multimillion dollar chemical industry on flame retardants is not backed up by solid data. Isn’t it even required for a kids pajamas to be labeled sleepware (one of the reasons we never bought our kids anything labeled for sleep). How did it get to through to becoming legislation without a lengthy reference list? I don’t know what to say!
May 9, 2012
It surprises me that the DoD would cut funding on blood substitutes considering how much they need it. This might have something to do with the shift to drones but either way I can see what you are getting at.
I don’t completely agree that there are no more Bell labs, some people are trying to keep the spirit alive and do still fund blue sky research that might not make it to market (Google’s X lab or IBM’s research division comes to mind) but yeah, such players are far and few between. I don’t know much about the bio/health sector and I don’t know of any companies that really go far out in fundamental research in that sector. The industries are of course very different and IT players have much bigger profits which allows them to take a bit more risk. I am all for government funded science especially in health and energy because those industries seem to have a hard time scaling up and attracting funds. Even with an eye on the market, selling life or death sounds really cruel. Sorry to make this political, I am largely liberal, but energy and health deserve a more social approach. Both funding and distribution should be carried by the state as a whole.
Rajini is in a better position to compare than I am but I would imagine that government funded science is getting harder in the US because of public opinion. I’ve read quite a few articles in which people question the science budget and most of those seem to originate from the US. In Europe we have the occasional hissyfit, the LHC comes to mind, but in general people don’t seem to care that much. The anti science sentiment is not as strong here so in general people don’t mind that a part of their taxes gets spent on fundamental science research. I’ve got a feeling that many republicans, especially the ones that hate taxes and want to shrink down the gov to the size of a peanut are not okay with spending ANY of their tax money on science.
May 9, 2012
Thanks for taking the time to read my long post Koen De Paus . Federal funding in the US is extremely tough right now because there is more competition for the same size pie, i.e., the budget has not kept up with inflation. In my field, grant budgets don’t reflect the cost of doing research, an MRI system cost millions of dollars. Of course there are politics as well, the anti-stem cell politics comes to mind.
The reason the DoD won’t fund research on blood substitutes is because the guy who was in charge of their program is convinced that because they spent millions on a losing compound, that no formulation will work. He believes that it is fundamentally impossible. I believe he retired so maybe things will change but I doubt. I submitted a grant proposal for combat casualty and it went nowhere.
May 9, 2012
Yeah that’s a very defeatist attitude. I don’t know enough about this field of research to give an opinion but if you think it can be done you definitely shouldn’t give up trying. Throughout history, most people that have said something couldn’t be done ended up being horribly horribly wrong. Planes would never fly, radio could never work, trying to extract power from atoms was ridiculous, … the list is miles long and includes very smart people saying very stupid things. :p
May 9, 2012
To this day, I’m amazed that one person convinced the army that the whole idea of a hemoglobin based oxygen carrier is doomed. Of course once Baxter had the failed clinical trial, where people died, everyone was cautious about the whole field. I think it’s grounds for the government funding agencies to go back to square 1 and determine what went wrong.
May 9, 2012
Interesting post, thanks for sharing your experience.
Re: funding in the public sector in the US.
As a young post-doc, 1.5 years under my belt, I have seen the effects of under-funding in science first hand. Not only does it limit the unknowns we can solve, it also prevents new scientists from even starting out. When I entered grad school, there were 10 people in my class, 4 had a difficult time finding a lab to join due directly to decreased funding. The next year, class size was cut to 5, the following year to 2. It broke my heart to see excellent candidates interview and be turned away from my program.
There needs to be a fundamental shift in the united states as to how it views science. Without that, its going to be a hard road to increase the NIH budget by any amount that would actually make a difference.
May 9, 2012
Keep your head up Kelly Daughtry. I saw an article a while ago about how the average length of a post-doc is now 5 years or something like that. What field are you in? Fortunately my I’m in biomedical research so the funding isn’t as bad as basic research like math or history (just two examples that popped into my head).
I was hoping to get more of a dialog going but I’m afraid that the long post or the fact that I’m not a G+ super star might squash that hope.
May 9, 2012
Well, some of us are paying attention, and I’m enjoying the comments thus far.
I’m in biomedical research as well, structural enzymology to be close to precise. Thus the idea of cross-linking or polymerizing Hb intrigued me. Im highly fascinated with de novo enzyme design. I would bet some of the computational biologists could come up with something.
I do hope the research is able to continue soon!