The Pink Army Story
In the early 00’s, Andrew Hessel, Pink Army’s founder, was working in a biotech environment with flexible boundaries and solid funding. Despite the beneficial environment, the research and development process wasn’t moving forward. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a drug to market successfully and development takes years. The majority of the scientific information collected along the way is proprietary, meaning it’s not shared. Only the small numbers of scientists employed by the pharmaceutical company and its partners get to review it for accuracy or make use of it in their own work. Needless to say, much data, time and money is wasted in the current system, and Hessel noticed this painful reality.
With an eye on the success of the technology industry, where open-source software dominates operating systems and web infrastructure, Hessel thought about how open access would make it easier to share ideas, publish protocols and tools, verify results, firewall bad designs, communicate best practices, and reduce risk. Since synthetic biology is like writing software for cells, wouldn’t it benefit from open source in the same way that the technology industry did? Additionally, the science was changing, with synthetic biotech moving from the lab into more and more computer-based calculations.
The cost of sequencing genes was falling rapidly. It seemed to Andrew the time was ripe to start a “garage biotech company”. The open-source model would also allow regular people – the very people who benefit the most from cancer breakthroughs – to invest, without requiring them to have deep pockets. In 2009, he incorporated Pink Army.
By focusing on individualized medicine, Pink Army avoids a hazard of large-scale cancer drug manufacturing – exorbitant costs and long delays. Manufacturing capability is limited to a small scale. Lab testing becomes simpler. Clinical trials with a sample size of one person – “n-of-1” — allow for rigorous profiling, complete integration and minimal liability.
