Crowdfunding used to support technology for determining efficacy of cancer treatment

MaRS Innovation is embracing crowdfunding to accelerate the commercialization of a promising technology for more accurately determining the efficacy of chemotherapy for treating breast cancer. The Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) is aiming to raise $97,000 by November 27th through the Indiegogo campaign platform to fund an initial clinical trial, with longer-term goal to raise a total of $687,000 to support a complete suite of four parallel clinical trials.

The technology was taken on by MaRS Innovation two years ago after years of development by its co-discoverers — Dr Gregory Czarnota of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Dr Michael Kolios of Ryerson Univ. Currently, it's impossible to determine whether a specific regime of chemotherapy is having the desired effect until after it has been completed.

"Sixty to seventy percent of chemotherapy treatments fail and right now there's no way to tell if it's effective until after chemotherapy is finished and in that four to six months, the cancer may have spread," says Fazila Seker, manager of project and venture development at MaRS Innovation and Wavecheck's campaign co-director. "We can now tell after just four weeks and we want to get that down to one week."

Crowdfunding — which has evolved from crowdsourcing and microfinancing — is quickly expanding beyond its initial uses of financing unusual gadgets and the arts to areas such as medical sciences. By leveraging small contributions from many individuals through the Internet and social media, it gives promising projects and small- and medium-sized enterprises a new source of private capital and provides a level of publicity not available before.

"The medical profession is extremely conservative and the Canadian funding environment is challenging," says MaRS Innovation VP Joel Liederman. "This project is translational, not research so it's a valley of death where it's hard to get funding. Enter crowdfunding."

"For this stage of development, larger amounts of funding are required and the granting councils only provide smaller amounts and as the amount required grows it's highly competitive. Crowdfunding can add real value to the scarcity of funding and leverage past research money from the granting councils and translate Canadian investments and take them to market"," says Seker. "We've been working on this project for two years and MaRS Innovation has provided $250,000 to show that it can be used in the clinic and can be replicated."

Wavecheck has already been used at Sunnybrook's Odette Cancer Centre and campaign funding will allow studies to proceed at Prince Margaret Hospital (Toronto), London Health Sciences Centre and the Univ of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

previous support

Wavecheck's development has been supported through its initial development stages by funding from the Terry Fox Research Institute, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canada Research Chairs program, FedDev Ontario, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Ontario's former Ministry of Research and Innovation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Cancer Care Ontario.

As of Nov 9th, the Wavecheck crowdfunding campaign raised $42,610 from 360 funders for 44% of the total, with $20,000 being raised on the first day. MaRS will not be using any of the funds raised and is donating its time and marketing resources, with 100% of proceeds going directly to the research teams carrying out the trials.

According to the first ever study in 2012 by Massolution/Crowdsourcing LLC, Pittsburgh, PA, crowdfunding grew 54% in 2011 and an estimated 60% in 2012, with Europe and North America the current hotspots. In 2011, $837 million was raised worldwide through crowdfunding.

In the technology field, crowdfunding serves as an alternative or complement to public and traditional private funding sources, helping firms finance aspects of technology development for which there is little or inadequate amounts of money. Pending or proposed changes in securities legislation in the US, Canada and elsewhere means that crowdfunding could soon be used for equity funding, opening up the instrument to a much broader economic sphere.

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