05.10.13
Advice against ricin rent-seeking
During the height of the war on terror you hardly ever saw anyone in the professional ranks with the nerve to say that grubbing for more defense research funding on the back of fear was inadvisable.
I am a scientist. I am not opposed to research. It is essential for the similar preparation required for either a bioweapons assault or a naturally emerging disease. Nevertheless, a fear-based crisis response, because public officials happened to be among the targets, is self-defeating.
Academics should resist the temptation to exploit the ricin letters to obtain more resources for their research. There are already ongoing scientific studies of ricin, including some that employ the toxin to kill cancer cells. We don’t need an infusion of money into ricin research. I don’t claim to know the motives of the ricin letter mailer or whether he got the idea from a television show. I do know that overreaction encourages future terrorists.
The author, David Sanders, is “an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue, is working on a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-sponsored curriculum-development project,” reads the newspaper.
“[Environmental] sensors for true biological agents are and will be for the foreseeable future wastes of money,” he adds.
Sanders also writes that the over-reaction to things like the Dutschke ricin-mailings inspires other terrorists.
He is echoing what I have written for years. The ocean of print, television and Internet news on the subject, during the war on terror years, established the received wisdom in the minds of would-be terrorists that biological and chemical warfare are easy to do.
As one consequence, many bad people have maintained an interest in fiddling with castor seeds.
It is fortunate that reality does not match the national belief that a ricin weapon is easy to make, simply by pounding castor seeds, and J. Everett Dutschke’s tainted letters were, in the final measure, just a damn nuisance.
After the ricin letters arrived and made news, a scientist and one company did immediately go rent-seeking.
And I wrote about it, pointing to a piece from Nature:
The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has developed a vaccine called RVEc, which protected mice that were exposed to inhaled ricin.2 The vaccine has also been tested in human volunteers, who subsequently developed antibodies to the toxin. But further human testing is needed, and it is not clear whether the Department of Defense will continue to fund the vaccine’s development.
The other leading vaccine candidate, RiVax, is made by a company called Soligenix, based in Princeton, New Jersey. The vaccine was initially developed by Ellen Vitetta, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and batches made by her group have been tested in animals. Those batches have also been found to be safe in healthy human volunteers, in whom they stimulated the production of antibodies.
But Soligenix has not yet tested the safety and effectiveness of its own batches of RiVax. The company’s development efforts have slowed as a result of budget constraints at its funding agency, the NIAID, says Vitetta.
“It basically is not going anywhere,??? she says. “It’s disappointing and upsetting.??? After an event such as the latest ricin mailings, “everyone wants to know where the vaccines are. Somebody has to think this work is important enough to fund us and let us finish it.???
Soligenix’s work on the vaccine is currently funded by a US$9.4-million NIAID grant, but further testing in animals to prove the treatment’s effectiveness would cost between $20 million and $40 million, says Chris Schaber, the company’s president.
And another from a New Jersey business journal:
Soligenix is actively working to develop vaccines for bioterrorism agents such as ricin, but funding the research remains a challenge, according to company president and CEO, Christopher J. Schaber.
“Every biodefense program needs to be sponsored by the government,??? said Schaber. “We don’t spend our own money on biodefense. The company could not take off with biodefense unless we secure a large procurement contract from the government, which are typically in the hundreds of millions of dollars …
Soligenix’s share price rose 20 percent this week after the ricin-laced letters to government officials were publicized.
Soligenix would make money if the government stockpiles the vaccine, but the research has to be funded and it has to get FDA approval before the company can procure a government contract.
“We’ve taken this very far with the support of the NIH (National Institutes of Health), but we really need to get a larger contract with more funding to allow us to move forward,??? Schaber said. “The government many times doesn’t move that quickly on these things, especially because a lot of people haven’t died.
Soligenix’s stock, which isn’t worth a great deal, shot up on the 16th and 17th, the day ricin letters to Roger Wicker and the President were discovered, boosted by speculators. A letter had been sent to a judge in Tupelo, MS, on the 10th but did not make the news until after the letters had been discovered in the nation’s capital.
J. Everett Dutsche was arrested on April 27 by the FBI.
Soligenix, a company that exists only because of taxpayer spending during the war on terror — from the archives.