why isnt funding FROM the public enough?
why must tax dollars be used?
Medical research in this country basically works as a partnership between government funded academic research and privately funded drug company research. Academics make the biological discoveries - they figure out basic mechanisms, figure out which proteins do what, how you can turn stem cells into a muscle cell or a nerve cell, etc. By and large, this sort of research is not immediately commercially useful. Knowing the mechanism doesn't give you a drug.
So what generally happens next is the private drug companies take the
freely available, public data generated by the academics and use it to design drugs. They say "Aha, protein X is important in this cancer pathway, let's design a drug to hit protein X!" They then design, research, test and bring to market the drug.
Thus, the research strategies are separate and complementary. Public money funds the really basic stuff that isn't commercially viable (yet). Private money uses that information to design commercially viable drugs. In short, public money funds
basic research, private money funds
applied research. It makes little sense for each to do the work of the other for business reasons.
So at this stage, ES cell work mostly belongs in the academic, publicly funded sector. Academics need to figure out how these cells work, how to successfully differentiate them into the various cell types, and various strategies to complement successful therapy. What happens if the academic sector doesn't do it?
It mostly won't get done. The drug companies have very little incentive to do this kind of research. It will cost a lot, and there is little guaranteed return. Plus, this is the way we've been successfully doing it for 50 years or so.
Don't mess with a good strategy!
).
