Caitlin Hird

May 2015

The Pitch

AKA: What's My Idea?

VacciNation (VN) is a new platform for social investment in the eradication and prevention of deadly diseases. Every big pharmaceutical company requires a certain amount of funding to create, develop, and deliver a vaccine to the public. From conception to completion, the process requires an enormous amount of capital. As most know, if the process does not make economic sense, the company will not deliver. As with any market, the businesses within the pharmaceutical world act rationally. However, there is an added pressure of social responsibility, and a true life-or-death scenario that requires the market to be viewed differently, and which results in the placement of quite a lot of blame on big pharma. So, how do you make drug developers produce the desirable outcome? Make the desired solution the rational one. Allow for social investment. Turn the current process, which is comprised of multiple stages of difficult-to-acquire funding from unconnected sources, a more streamlined, transparent process. Connect the motivated parties in an accessible manner.

Essentially, there is a huge issue with major pharma in that there is no true motivation to make drugs that will have a large and lasting social impact. As many know, there is no profit to be made in infectious disease or terminal disease, because the patients are either too poor to buy the treatment, or the treatment is a one-off solution which will not make the company very much money. Many large pharmaceutical companies have stopped any sort of development or production of these drugs entirely, because investors are not interested in drugs with no profitability. This means that those who are interested in making drugs for diseases that matter have to go to the government for funding. This is unfortunate, because there are limited government funds that are often focused on the “disease of the moment.” I, on the other hand, am not interested in investors looking for a high rate of return on investment, nor am I interested in the slow process of government funding. I want efficiency for necessary drugs. I believe that there are more motivated funders out there than just the government and profit-motivated VCs, and I seek to connect them with a market of all proposed drugs in a crowd-funding, or “crowd partnering” platform.