Entrepreneur Offers Crowdfunding For Health Startups, Including His Own 35
awjourn writes "As the SEC hashes out the final rules for crowdfunding equity investments in startups, one NYC entrepreneur is jumping into an industry that popular crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter won't go anywhere near: health. His company, MedStartr, launched July 11 with six companies seeking to raise money from the crowd for their health products and services. Among them, EndoGoddess, an app diabetics can use to track their blood sugar. Even MedStartr wants to raise funding on MedStartr. But will crowdfunding fly in healthcare, and more importantly, will regulators at the FDA and SEC be on board with it?"
Specific Implementations Vs the General Idea (Score:2)
Re:Specific Implementations Vs the General Idea (Score:5, Informative)
I mean you can kickstart anything right?
It seems you can not. FTFA:
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They don't fit into the guidelines [kickstarter.com]. In specific, health care service providers aren't:
"Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater."
So that's why there are so many Kickstarter spinoffs.
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Biotech is still technology - just spin it the right way when submitting.
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and diet is food.
you cannot kickstart anything (Score:4, Informative)
i can't link to the url, because i can only find these guidelines from the edit screen for my kickstarter project (see my sig), but there is a lot you cannot kickstart:
Recursive crowdfunding (Score:2)
RISUG (Score:1)
FDA and the source of funds? (Score:4, Insightful)
will regulators at the FDA ... be on board with it?
What does the FDA care where the money came from? That's not their job. The FDA is there to make sure that the end product is safe and effective, they shouldn't care who paid for the development of it.
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The FDA regulates medical advertising, so this may fall under that umbrella.
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that's a good point. but there is no product being advertised for end users, just advertising for venture capital
of course, if the product gets demoed and sampled by random end users, and this is made possible by this guy's kickstarter like portal, yeah, that's a problem. it's a fine line he's walking, and he should be very careful. it doesn't mean his scheme won't work, it just means all the implications and possibilities have to be thought out in advance and guarded against, or he will go down in legal fl
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The FDA is there to make sure that the end product is safe and effective
It shouldn't care whether the product is effective either.
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it should care if it is effective. snake oil salesman kill people financially, and literally, by wasting their time on ineffective or even potentially dangerous "treatments" for medical conditions. people with medical conditions are desperate, and they don't have a medical degree. society owes it to them to protect them from charlatans
besides, you like to hear this on your tv?:
HEADON! Apply directly to the forehead!
HEADON! Apply directly to the forehead!
HEADON! Apply directly to the forehead!
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snake oil salesman kill people financially, and literally, by wasting their time
And FDA kills people financially and literally by delaying drugs by as much as a decade or more and making them MUCH more expensive. It's important to look at both sides of the equation. Letting people die while preventing them by law from trying promising and potentially life saving drugs because they have not gone thought the entire test cycle is criminal and yet it happens every day. Not to mention the issue of liber
you are a moron (Score:1)
i'm sorry, i know, i should be more patient, and kind, but you're just a fucking idiot
you don't give drugs to people that aren't tested. i thought the drugs were expensive due to the development costs
and your "liberty" ends when some yahoo sues because no one told him the drug was not tested and the government and drug developer bears responsibility for his kidneys not working anymore. and he would have a perfectly good case!
try to think things through next time, then form an opinion. thanks for playing
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Disclaimer: IANAD (and I am not part of the US system either but things are still similar over this side of the globe)
Im sorry but you assume a "promising" drug will be beneficial to people in this situation.
Many "promising" drugs have killed people quicker than the condition they claim to be treating. Not to mention the drugs that have repercussions for generations to come (thalidomide comes to mind on that front - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide [wikipedia.org]).
If the person is willing to try these, they go int
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And this is somewhere I strongly disagree with you. In a world where many many fraudsters try to pass off quack medicine as real, and where many people are likely to use one of these instead of a real treatment, there is major harm done by allowing medicines that simply do not work to be sold as medicine.
If you claim your product has an effect, you had better be able to back that up with proof. It's really just truth in advertising laws (something North America is sadly lacking)
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The FDA is there to make sure that the end product is safe and effective It shouldn't care whether the product is effective either.
Yes it should. Giving a product an official government stamp of approval carries the strong implication that it is not simply a tube of coloured water, but that it actually works.
And, yes Virginia, this is interfering with the free market, in much the same way that prosecuting Bernie Madoff for fraud was interfering with his freedom to con people.
Why would the FDA give a damn? (Score:3)
The FDA certainly has its own set of Things It Takes Seriously; but those largely concern testing. Aside from, incidentally, testing a company's ability to stick it out long enough to make it through the approval process, does the FDA even pay attention to that stuff?
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Testing, and production, and quality assurance, and packaging, and marketing and advertising, and... There's a lot that falls under the FDA's regulatory umbrella even though almost none of it other than testing makes the news.
I suspect that advertising for investment while ma
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Empirically, though, the FDA is far too overstretched to do jack about the legion of 'this is a "food supplement" it is not intended to treat, cure, or diagnose any disease; but it encourages general welfare, boosts the immune system, and is used in traditional Chinese homeopathy modalities to treat cancer!" vendors.
You still need to do it right (Score:1)
Side note: This week only, my eBook on the topic is a free download, Unlocking Kickstarter Secrets: Crowdfunding Tips and Tricks [mariolurig.com].
Wouldn't touch it (Score:2)
I don't know about them, but I wouldn't touch any health care related project with a ten foot pole. In this country, it is a sure road to lawsuits and financial ruin. If you're lucky, you might first make just enough money to pay the lawyers.
Define "Health" (Score:2)
For example, Just before this post, I was reading this other post on Engadget:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/12/exclusive-hands-on-with-the-lumoback-smart-posture-sensor-video/ [engadget.com]
Basically, Lumoback is KickStarter project, which monitors back bad posture, and help correct it. You can clearly see the medical application; a doctor could assign one to a patient to help them with back pans etc.
(Just to clarify, I am not saying it a *good* way to do so, merely that a medical aspect *exist*, which allows us to defi
Thanks (Score:1)