The Immunity Project is not your typical Y Combinator startup. They aren’t interested in social media, the sharing economy, or wearable technology. They don’t care about apps, games, location based services or new ways of communicating with one another. Rather, they care about one thing and one thing only: saving lives. The way they intend to do that is by creating a synthetic vaccine for AIDS which they then intend to give away for free!!!
In order to pull this off this group of Harvard, Stanford, and MIT scientists aimed to exploit the fact that some people are born with a natural immunity to HIV. The goal was then to identify these “controllers” and reverse engineer how the body was able to ward off AIDS in these people. The group has taken to crowd funding to get this project funded and their pledge page sums up what they are trying to do perfectly:
“Like the finely tuned laser scope on a sniper rifle, the immune systems of controllers have the ability to target the biological markers on the HIV virus that are its achilles heel. When a controller’s immune system attacks these biological markers it forces the virus into a dormant state. Non controllers have sniper rifles, but they are missing this critical targeting ability.”
As great as an Aids vaccine would be it pales in comparison though to the ultimate end goal of this organization. As Y Combinator’s Sam Altman told Fast Company, “Imagine a world where vaccines are developed for a tiny fraction of the big pharma cost and given away for free to everyone who needs them…We thought that work done by Microsoft Research that underlies this was really interesting, and we’re always interested in areas where software can change how things are done. Technology means doing more with less; this is an extreme example…”
That is a world that I would very much like to imagine but it’s one in which I just assumed, as we all did, that would never happen. The big pharmaceutical companies would never allow it. But thanks to crowd funding and big data they may not have a choice anymore. The implications of this are far reaching and have so far flown under the radar while this particular project steals the spotlight and rightfully so. But make no mistake about it. Crowd funding cures for diseases and then giving them away for free is a monumental game changing idea. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
If you are interested in pledging you can visit: https://pledge.immunityproject.org/the-free-hiv-aids-vaccine. I’ll be right behind you.
These are the people who could be revolutionizing the way we do healthcare.
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