CanFel Therapeutics

Yesterday marked a milestone for a project that i have been working on for the past four or so years, CanFel Therapeutics.

We launched our Indigogo campaign after a number of years of beating on the shuttered doors of Silicon Valley investors large and small and the various Pharma/Biotech companies that dots the landscape of America. It seems everywhere we looked the answer was the same. The market, we were instructed, was not big enough. No one, we were told, is willing to spend anything more than just a vet visit on their sick pets. Antibody therapeutics, we were kindly informed, was too expensive to discover, develop, and commercialize

Yet, the market is there. Pet owners are willing to find the best care for their pets. Pet health insurance policies are now common instead of being a novelty. There was a disconnect between what we heard during the closing of the various meetings we attended and the reality we see evolving around us daily.

When we first thought of the idea, all the principles of CanFel were still gainfully employed at Raven biotechnologies, inc., and pushing hard towards an IND for an antibody we called KID3. We eventually got KID3 from frustrating my dogma filled mind, on the bench, to a human patient in a little under 14 months (where upon it was renamed RAV12), but the dream about veterinary drug development never died. Then Macrogenics bought Raven, RAV12 got (in my most humble but firmly - nay - staunchly held opinion) prematurely terminated just two patients into a Phase 2 Pancreatic Cancer trial, and the Ravenites started being scattered to the wind.

i left two years after the Macrogenics buy out (spending a total of 10 years, a quarter of my life, with Raven). i joined another SSF start up biotech and once again delved into drug discovery and exploring new drug delivery/control possibilities. Jennie and Penny, co-founders of Raven and part of the brain trust of CanFel, saw the writing on the wall but were determined to work to their ideals until their own clocks were punched. CanFel was still in our focus then, as Raven/Macrogenics begin to slip away from our day to day. Then came the time, recently, when all three of us were persons of leisure. Having shed our professional responsibilities and commitment to a third party entity, we seriously delved into trying to jump start CanFel. That then resulted in yesterday's Indigogo campaign launch.

Finally agreeing to disagree with the great minds of Silicon Valley and the Biotech/Pharma-verse, we decided to appeal to the general public for funding. Surely, we thought, there must be a better way to test the validity of our believed market (abundant) and Biotech/Pharma/Silicon Valley's believed market (limited) for antibody based Veterinary oncology therapeutics. Crowdfunding, as it turns out, was the best suited experimental vehicle to test the differing beliefs. Let the arbitrator be the same public that will be the market for the product we wish to produce. Here, no pundit or personal bias will hold sway. Giving ample chance for exposure through social media and word by mouth, let the public decide on the feasibility and marketability of antibody based veterinary cancer therapies.

Well, the dice has been cast. The experiment has begun. Let loose, as they say, the fortunes and fate of humanity (well, the dogs of war really, but hardly fitting). Let see who the smiling green Lady of Terry Pratchett's imagination will side with, CanFel or everyone else that has told CanFel that CanFel is an impossibility.

Cast your vote...