With a series of fantastic people, I am helping Nicolas André to launch the Metronomics Global Health Initiative to combine cutting-edge scientific research, new business models and social innovation and develop alternative anti-cancer strategies at the service of children in the developing world.
Metronomic chemotherapy is based on the chronic administration of chemotherapeutic agents at relatively low, minimally toxic doses, and with no prolonged drug-free breaks.
Drug repositioning consists in using old drugs for new indications. Because of their well know and well established low toxicities, their low cost and their new mechanism of action, they allow low income countries to innovate to built the treatments their people with cancer need at low cost.
The Metronomics-Global-Health–Initiative aims to :
1) demonstrate that metronomic approach can lead to improve the lives of children with cancer in developing countries and establish it as "a standard of cancer" in some situations. Beyond the metronomic treatments, this approach brings a novel view on cancer disease and cancer cares.
2) gather funding to develop or help developing projects based on metronomic approach to fight cancer in children living in developing countries
3) facilitate cross-sectors partnership we can bring to life projects that will revolutionize management of cancer in low income countries and maybe in turn in industrialized cancer.
4) establish Metronomics-Global-Health–Initiative as a major partner in developing new strategies to fight cancer
Although our main focus is children suffering from in developing countries, we will also develop and facilitate new projects concerning metronomic treatments in adults and in industrialized countries.
We will also look for innovative ways to develop these new therapies. Indeed, we need new business models to meet the health needs of the poorest population of the world: as of today, 90% of the market addresses the needs of the 15% richest.
On the other hand, 80% of all children live in developing countries, 200,000 of them being diagnosed with cancer each year. These children have only very limited access to curative treatments and only about 25% will survive (in high-income countries, approximately 75% of the 50,000 children diagnosed with cancer each year survive).
Visit our website... and join us to find new ways to cure cancer for children in the developing world.
Work with us through our Call for Students Projects: Business Models for the Metronomics Global Health Initiative!
Check out the session on Alternative Ethical strategies for Global Health in Developing Countries of the course Ethics and Health taught by Raquel Garredo and Marc Le Menestrel.
