Cooperatives are community-owned and operated enterprises that exist to serve their memberships. They are corporations that operate as non-profits and can have broad membership, because people don‘t need to be qualified investors to get a share. They can raise substantial sums by attracting a large membership — an army — something that is fairly easy to do these days because of social networking sites like Facebook. Members of the cooperative are united by their common interest, in Pink Army‘s case, better, faster, and less expensive treatments for breast cancer.

Breast cancer is the first target, but ultimately the cooperative‘s goal is to open a path from diagnostics to the clinic for individualized medicines — to make effective cancer treatments as fast as diagnostic data can be translated into designs, manufactured, tested in the lab, and approved for use on a single person.

Using open source synthetic biology, each of these steps can be automated, and each will get cheaper over time. We chose a coop structure because it is a business structure that is community oriented, can support open source, and is resistant to big pharma’s cash and lawyers.