Everything Against Everything
▲ Photo by Trnava University on Unsplash
Everything Against Everything (EvE) will accelerate early-stage drug discovery, causing the launch of more, better quality drugs, ultimately leading to large improvements in human health.
Scientific progress has provided humanity with tremendous value. The discovery of drugs is no exception - it is estimated that up to 200 million lives were saved by the discovery of penicillin alone. However, in recent years there has been some concern that scientific progress has slowed.
To tackle key bottlenecks in scientific research, a new model of organization has been proposed - “Focused Research Organizations (FROs)”. FROs are organizations created solely to solve scientific or technological challenges that cannot be efficiently addressed by the existing organizational structures of academia, industry, or government.
EvE is an FRO aiming to accelerate drug discovery. They will do this by mapping out the interactions of all (known) drug compounds against every human protein that plays a role in disease. EvE will then release the results of this mapping as an open source database. This will increase the efficiency in which drugs are developed, improving health.
We believe supporting Everything Against Everything is especially promising because:
- By mapping out the interactions between all drug compounds and human proteins, EvE will make the drug discovery pipeline more efficient. We estimate this will cause 0.6% more drugs to be discovered per year.
- The discovery of a new drug is extremely valuable. We estimate that (on average) one extra drug prevents over 100,000 DALYs every year.
- Without EvE, it is unlikely that a project of this scale will otherwise go ahead. Scientific funding from sources such as the NIH has been historically risk-averse, and not with the aim of cost-effectively improving global health.
- Therefore, it is very unlikely that a project of this scale will be carried out or funded by traditional sources of scientific research.
- EvE has been extensively reviewed by seven external experts, who “unanimously agreed that the dataset EvE is proposing to produce would be of significant value to drug discovery and biology more broadly”
To learn more, we recommend:
