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A comment on If Immunity Project (YC W14) succeeds, they'll offer AIDS vaccine for free. Parent comment

Re:If Immunity Project (YC W14) succeeds, they'll offer AIDS... by rposborne on Thursday January 23, 2014 @02:18PM (#7110457)
It's actually surprisingly accurate. This part in particular " Anytime a product completely novel and innovative enters this space, it is extremely difficult to obtain early adopter. " Bringing a drug to market is a massive undertaking and most Biotech Investors look at novel treatments as way to high of a risk.
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Re:If Immunity Project (YC W14) succeeds, they'll offer AIDS... by GarrettBeck on Thursday January 23, 2014 @02:45PM (#7110654)
Genentech asked Kleiner Perkins for a $3.0 million dollar investment back in the 70s to see if it was even possible to accomplish genome splicing. The investment would have paid for building a new lab, new equipment, etc. KP decided to give them $500k and rent the UCLA lab instead. That was a groundbreaking investment (and the VC business had only been around for 15-20 years).

In the current landscape of investing, crowdfunding has become the vehicle for riskier investments that traditional VCs no longer make (because they don't fit 10% x $2 billion = happy LPs) and I'm sure KP knows firsthand about dealing with bio-pharma regulations.

Hats off to Immunity and YC.

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Re:If Immunity Project (YC W14) succeeds, they'll offer AIDS... by _delirium on Thursday January 23, 2014 @08:45PM (#7112877)
Government grants go to all sorts of things that have a <10% chance of panning out big, though. That's the point of public funding for basic research (something some of its critics don't get).
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