A non-profit initiative · India
We've all been there. Facing something that felt too big to solve.
And then, suddenly, there is something we can do.
The burden
Cancer is not an even burden. Where you are born decides whether a diagnosis is survivable, and whether surviving it leaves your family solvent.
Growing at a global compound rate of 2.5% a year, and that is despite significant under-diagnosis and under-reporting. The true curve is steeper than the one we can see.
Deaths per 1,000 diagnoses — the mortality-to-incidence ratio. The same disease, three very different sentences.
A person diagnosed in India is more than twice as likely to die of it as a person diagnosed in North America. Biology did not decide that. Access did.
The cost of one year of treatment, measured in something more honest than currency: how long you must work to pay for it.
For many families this is not a bill. It is bankruptcy, and a debt that outlives the patient.
Source: GLOBOCAN 2022, International Agency for Research on Cancer
The people
Five lives, from among the millions. Details have been changed; none of this is unusual.
A folk singer in Rajasthan developed laryngeal cancer. After surgery, he lost his voice completely. For a man whose livelihood and identity came from singing, it was a living grief. He sat silently at village festivals, tears in his eyes, watching others sing the songs he once led.
He died twice. Once when he lost his voice, and once when the disease took him.— his wife
In London, a nine-year-old boy lost his mother to breast cancer. Before she died, she recorded voice notes and left letters for every milestone: his eighteenth birthday, his graduation, his wedding.
Opening those letters felt like hugging a ghost.— to his counsellor, years later
Cancer robbed him of her presence. Her words became a bridge across time.
A factory worker in Gujarat quietly battled stomach cancer. He stopped showing up one day, and coworkers assumed he had found another job. Months later they learned he had died, and that his wife was working as a cleaner in the same factory.
The silence around his illness is the point. Cancer erases people from the margins, and no one notices until they are gone.
A farmer in West Bengal borrowed heavily and pawned his wife's jewellery to treat his young daughter's cervical cancer. Travel to the city hospital cost nearly as much as the medicines. After two chemotherapy cycles he could no longer pay. Treatment stopped.
The daughter blamed herself for being a burden.
In Kolkata, a young man started chemotherapy at a private hospital. Bills quickly swallowed his family's savings. He sold his motorcycle, then borrowed from relatives. When the money ran out, treatment stopped midway.
He returned to his village, where the disease spread unchecked.
The world we want
cancer therapy costs thousands instead of lakhs. Maybe even hundreds.
treatments are taken orally, or as a simple injection, so that the costs around the treatment don't drown you.
people don't hide their diagnosis for fear of bankrupting their families, and so detection happens earlier, when something can still be done.
clinical trials can be run cost-effectively, and the probability of success is high.
hope for a few more years, hope for remission, is real to many, many more.
The possibilities
Six conditionals. Each one is an engineering problem, not a miracle.
Not science fiction
Nothing below is a research proposal. Each is available, today, to anyone who knows where to look. The work is assembling them into something a hospital in Kolkata can actually use.
AI can predict the structure of proteins, the basic functional units of life and of disease.
available nowAI can predict how a candidate drug will interact with a target protein.
available nowAI can predict how a drug will affect metabolic pathways inside human cells.
available nowDecades of biomedical research are free to use, and can be read at scale with AI and open-source tools.
available nowSophisticated instruments of biomedical research are free. They can be democratised.
available nowIn-silico testing of drug candidates in minutes instead of years.
available nowLab testing on human tissue instead of animal testing, and it is gaining regulatory recognition.
available nowUsing all of the above to forecast trial results and raise success ratios before a single patient is enrolled.
available nowRecruitment and coordination across many centres, at a fraction of the cost.
available nowThis is not science fiction.
It could be happening as we speak.
The paths
Select a path to read what it means and where it stands today.
Create digital public infrastructure that democratises access to global resources, brings down the cost of drug discovery, clinical trials and approval, and creates a vibrant ecosystem for innovation.
Facilitate academic research to repurpose off-patent drugs for cancer, run the clinical trials, and drive adoption of the low-cost therapies that result. This work overcomes the natural profit-optimising objective of large pharmaceutical companies, which have little reason to fund it.
Create a policy framework and funding mechanisms that make it viable to commercialise low-cost therapies, including therapies arrived at by repurposing off-patent drugs.
The platform
A collaborative research environment where an oncologist or a graduate student can pose a biological question in plain language, and have it answered against the world's open biomedical data, literature and tooling. Built on a core engine from Stanford University, hosted pro bono, and operated by the BioStack Research Council.
access BioLab is currently open to collaborating researchers and institutions. If you do not yet have an account, write to us and tell us what you are working on.
The ask
To create access to hope, for millions. Three ways to be part of it.
Clinical, scientific, technical and regulatory judgement. Time from people who have done this before.
write to us ii20 in-silico research projects. 5 lab-based validation studies. 6 to 8 clinical trials for drug repurposing.
Project management is done pro bono, so donor funding goes to the science.
write to us iiiInstitutions, companies and individuals who can build, host, validate, recruit, or open a door.
write to usThe collective
The BioStack and Adopt-a-Cure are guided by a collective of oncologists, pathologists, computational biologists, technologists, and industry leaders, contributing their time without charge.
We would like to express our deep gratitude to the late Dr Anita Borges, who encouraged us to take this project forward.
