Scammy Crowd Funding

Snake oil salesmen are moving to the lucrative crowd funding market, where a slick video presentation and an enthusiastic presenter is all one needs to pitch the scam.

GoBe’s HealBe is the best known crowd funding scam. It was called out during it’s funding run. Nevertheless they presented the product at CES 2015.

Scammy crowd funding is now becoming such a big business that scammers are employing digital marketing firms to run their campaigns independently from the major crowd funding sites. By doing so they retain total control of their pseudoscientific pitch. The scientific publication Nature exposes the latest, and probably the worst, of these scams:

[…] missing from Rubsamen’s promotional campaign are any HIV researchers or data supporting the effort’s scientific strategy. The unorthodox approach raises the question of whether crowd-funding in Silicon Valley, which tends to be more impressed with technology and marketing than peer-reviewed data, is compatible with medical research — an increasingly pertinent issue as scientists appeal to the public to fund more projects aimed at developing therapies. This is banned by large crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, but medical researchers are finding other means to solicit cash. On 6 February, for instance, San Francisco, California-based evolutionary pharmacologist Ethan Perlstein began a campaign to raise $1.5 million to support his independent lab via AngelList, an investors’ social network, and Rubsamen has hired a digital-marketing firm to run his campaign.

“I worry that the skills necessary to run a successful crowd-funding campaign are orthogonal to the skills needed to make a successful therapy,” says Max Hodak, co-founder of the Menlo Park, California-based biotechnology company Transcriptic, which raised $1.2 million of its $4.1 million in funding on AngelList. “You can have people who are bad at science but are good at fundraising in public.“

Other scientists are sceptical of the Immunity Project’s strategy, which aims to trigger immune cells, called T cells, to attack HIV-infected cells in the body. The project hopes to find pieces of  HIV, called epitopes, that are targeted by HIV ‘controllers’ — people who naturally keep HIV in check. Rubsamen’s scientific collaborator, computer scientist David Heckerman of Microsoft Research, analyses these epitopes. Rubsamen hopes that by incorporating these epitopes into a vaccine, he can spur anyone to produce the same protective T-cell response as that seen in HIV controllers.

But HIV researchers say that controllers quash HIV in part thanks to their genetic make-up, which cannot be duplicated in non-controllers. That would make it impossible for a non-controller to completely mimic a controller’s T-cell response.

Picker and other researchers are working on improving T-cell vaccines, while others are trying to trigger a response mediated by protective proteins, called antibodies, rather than T cells. Both approaches have failed in human clinical trials of HIV vaccines. Researchers are working on improvements to both strategies.