Engineering your Own Personal Virus to Attack your Breast Cancer. For $20?
There is such buzz these days about the Pink Army Cooperative - the first people-owned biotech company. And it promises to bring down the cost of the breast cancer cure besides making it more effective. Paying $20 buys you a place in the cooperative and grants you admittance to the cooperatives brand of cancer cure which uses synthetic biology. Women with a family history are jubilant over the promise of a new breast cancer cure. They are eager to join in as they see they have nothing to lose, and if the research shows results, much to gain, for sure. The co-op has certainly a long way to go. The research has not made much progress yet. But people are eager to join because the concept is very attractive and there is a great willingness to help cancer research.
Conventionally, surgery is the way to go for breast cancer cure when its a localized tumor. Chemotherapy follows the surgery and sometimes precedes it too.In breast cancer cure, the standard practice is for the surgeon to make completely sure that he has excised the cancer completely. More tissue has to be removed than is absolutely necessary, to leave out clear margins. You see where this is going - women the world over wish for a better alternative to this kind of benign torture.
So what is the biology technology approach the Pink Army Cooperative has in mind? What they do is, to engineer a virus whose genetic programming is to infect breast cancer cells and kill them. An out-of-control infection for an out-of-control cell type in the body. Once you have your name down on their subscription list with your $20, you can tap into the breast cancer cure they produce for free. Basically, your prescription gets filled based on your subscription. And your investment would bring you not just your medicines when you need them, you would get a share of ownership of the cure that your money engineered.
So why is this method any better than the regular major pharmaceutical corporations' method? Is it just that it ends up costing you to buy your medicines in the end? The thing is, the major corporations invest too much money in their research, and when new developments appear on the horizon, they are unable to adjust, to change course quickly - kind of like a large ship bearing down on an iceberg. Biology technology is not as esoteric as it once was, and smaller and nimbler competitors can do as good a job. To have the large pharmaceutical corporations keep churning out their ordinary medicines and chemicals from a generation past, makes no sense. This day belongs to biology technology.
The computerized devices needed to sequence DNA don't need a billion dollars to buy anymore. Any modestly funded enterprise can get their hands on them, and study each unique patient's unique breast cancer DNA. The doctors then engineer a unique virus for just the kind of breast cancer DNA that particulat patient has. Even a couple of years ago, that kind of space-age breast cancer cure would cost tens of millions of dollars each patient. It's still something that'll set you back a million today, but it's progress. And if you are with the Pink Army Co-op , you could probably get it down to pocket change.
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