Ask HN: Researchers: What practical research hasn't been commercialized?
It's my understanding that many fields have practical, useful research results that never get brought to market. Most often, it's because researchers lack the time and interest to starting a business, or the researcher's university owns patents and entrepreneurs don't want to deal with the licensing process, or simply that no one outside the field is even aware of the practical applications of the research.
So I ask all you HN researchers: What results are you aware of that can solve problems and help people, but haven't yet been commercialized?
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[ 291 ms ] story [ 540 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
Except the existing way is quickly no longer working, hence antibiotic resistance. Also, it's not speculative, phage therapy works.
Somewhat similar: I had to get several injections of the subunit anthrax vaccine that essentially doesn't work (even though live attenuated anthrax is far more effective) because some regulatory committee doesn't like the idea of live (or even whole cell) vaccines.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/05/the-best-vir...
Phages are specific to particular bacteria, more specific than an antibiotic. This means you need to develop many more varieties of phage to cover the same ground.
These phages are perishable, and alive. That means you have to put much more effort into developing, and maintaining stocks.
Lastly, you need to have specific diagnoses of patients. You need to know which phage to give, based on the bacteria infecting the patient. This means more patient tests, and more time between arrival and treatment.
This all adds up the costs. Phage therapy is better suited to targeted diseases like MRSA than a replacement of chemotherapy.
It isn't legal to sell a treatment for any disease or condition unless you've conducted multiple rounds of clinical trials proving that it is both safe and effective. Running these trials is fantastically expensive, especially when you don't know ahead of time which treatments will make it out the other side to become sellable products.
Pharma companies are good at getting things through these trial stages. But they can't afford to do it unless there's a patent-protected profit on the other side for the ones that work.
Thus the problem is that phages are essentially a virus picked up out of some pond muck or something. You can't really mass-produce them, and it wouldn't make sense to anyways, as the application for any one phage is very limited. You can't run a particular phage though a set of clinical trials - the effectiveness of a particular strain would be gone long before you got through the first phase. Making enough profit from selling it after commercialization once it made it through the clinical trials that it can't possibly ever pass is a completely absurd notion.
What we need to make phages more widely used isn't economic investment but a complete redo of how we legally require the healthcare industry to operate.
1) Even with resistance on the rise, we still have antibiotics that work. Phage therapy is a "someday we're going to need this...we think" type treatment.
2) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both expensive and tricky.
3) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.
4) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West, which means there's just less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.
There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in undergrad (I'm now a tenure-track professor). The problem is it's hard, and antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling on the excitement that they can generate.
developing new antibiotics in general is difficult in the US because there are many generic antibiotics that work well, so your pricing power is often quite low. but your R&D costs are still just as high as something like cancer, where you can charge hundreds of thousands a year per patient. so R&D dollars go to higher ROI assets. see novartis, which recently axed its antibiotics division
super resistant bugs are a big issue however and there is probably an investment case there, esp at a time like this when capital is so available. i dont know how hard it would be to develop drugs against particular resistant strains, how many patients get each infection / year, how long you have to intervene before pts die, etc, but i can imagine its a tough field
You're going to have to put your money where your mouth is!
Not all societies view a shortcoming or failure as a learning opportunity and stepping stone to success.
it’s not everybody’s.
I’m not interested in sending you money for your ideas, thanks. There’s all kinds of people. If there is a big enough problem to be addressed then there exists not only information hoarders/squatters like yourself, but also others who would be willing to elaborate to just move something forward and try to get their problem solved.
Sadly science funding in the US is an absolute shitshow and science costs money so...
I think you should consider this from the position of a researcher with no funding sitting on valuable ideas. Commercializing that idea can fund other research they want to do. So even from the perspective of wanting science to be free and the common heritage of mankind, a researcher can do more science by capitalizing on a valuable idea.
It's kinda shitty, but science doesn't take place in a vacuum, researchers have to eat.
I get where you're coming at, but I just don't think it's realistic. You can't just ignore incentives.
The example I know of is the Innovation Deport in Birmingham, AL (my hometown) being attached to the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The university does a lot of medical research and from what I hear, the Innovation Depot is trying to establish itself as the go-to place for professors to take their patents and provide business/engineering/manufacturing expertise.
https://innovationdepot.org/
[1] https://www.uab.edu/research/innovation/
That department might just be the university side of the accelerator.
1) Get someone else to commercialize your research (tech transfer often does this)
and
2) Start a business around your research
Have very different paths and consequences.
But the fact is, an idea's current feasibility may be a function of its present constraints. Opportunities open up when constraints change [1]. This is why it can be useful to revisit old ideas and test them against the current environment.
[1] "Objectives and constraints", https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/06/26/objectives-and-con...
But I'm not sure that it is an inevitable fact that most people will end up having the same ideas. Someone once said that in humongous countries like China and India, it is statistically inevitable they have thought of most of the things the rest of the world have thought of.
But why hasn't China come up with thoughts that German philosophers have come up with, or with specific ideas that have come out of the west? I think it's because there wasn't a focus on the things that mattered to Europeans at the time. Culture and environment matters, and dictates the ideas we are capable of having.
Large populations are not made up of uncorrelated, independent individuals. Most of the those individuals have highly correlated thoughts, mostly driven by the culture at large.
Either everyone else is stupid, or too lazy to come up with a plan to do it, or a myriad of other reasons. It doesn't matter why.
Like someone else pointed out the industry timing, state of technology and funding for that matter all drive these possibilities.
In the end only execution matters, and that comes with a long list of prerequisites aligning just right to even begin to form a possible positive outcome. It's luck and determination. The rest fail anywhere in-between, only to try again a decade or so later when the cycle repeats.
Welcome to the status quo. Don't like it?
Change it.
If researchers are not asking this themselves then they should be drummed out, and if they are asking this and they don't have an answer, and are still doing it, then they should be drummed out. Good people know why things didn't work last time, and they can give you a pin point explanation as to what needs to be done to break the bottleneck and make progress.
Case in point : Hinton and Deep Networks. Training big networks is impractical, you need vast amounts of labelled data, you need vast amounts of compute, the over fit. So - build auto encoding layers, build rectified activation functions, do drop out. Well developed, careful attacks on specific issues.
Another one is what's happening with fusion research at MIT right now : Whyte's attacking scale, attacking containment, attacking ablation. There are specific problems articulated, specific approaches to tackle them. These approaches come with risk, large risk, but it's not "because this time it's different"
It isn't research, but I was at a party the other day and this women who works at a record company specialising in classical music said that an classical music app with high quality recordings didn't exist.
Funding goes to popularity, not new research. This is even true at DARPA where they ignore new technology because it doesn't fit some preconceived notion or don't have a framework to evaluate it.
Case in point for XAI, explainable artificial intelligence. The algorithms we use today give us black box models we can't interpret directly. So instead of fixing the algorithms, they focus on modeling the models and "guessing" which ones come close enough via simpler more intuitive stacks of models. Guesses upon guesses.
There has been research in new algorithms that generate open models where the weights make sense and are editable. There is one company working on this, but it's not nearly enough.
There's another set of research that has managed to convert black box models into open ones, giving full transparency.
Then there's asynchronous circuits research which do not require a clock. These can reduce power usage and boost efficiency on low power devices. Not much going on here.
There's one group building a RISC5 architecture with these, based on 30+ year old research with the inventor who still has not seen his life's work commercialized.
Then there's various types of imaging and tracking with signals we use every day, such as BT, Wi-Fi and Cellular among others, and being able to locate devices or people. You can find several universities doing this, none have made it commercially.
As for the conversions, I think these guys are working on a service or with early customers. https://optimizingmind.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Regulatory, nuclear material proliferation and safety concerns have prevented anyone from doing so up until now.
The trick is in the execution and application. What problem are you going to solve? Are you able to build up the surrounding "boring" bits necessary to productize something?
Also, the reason the jets are so slow is that supersonic flight is illegal for civilan aircraft over much developed land. There are ways to greatly reduce the noise though, and for subsonic aircraft there are also ways to fly fast but very silent if optimized for this. We have the tech, the oscillations have to be eliminated in e.g. rocket engines, and we are talking about conditions that we can simulate due to the temperature and pressure being in much more comfortable ranges.
Some of my ex-collegues were working on this: https://pp.ipd.kit.edu/publication.php?id=jodroid2015atps
Turn the research prototype into a practical tool. Hope to get acquihired by Google or Apple for their app store.
edit: it seems like this groups work is open sourced actually https://pp.ipd.kit.edu/projects/joana/
The core technology is not the thing to commercialize. The valuable thing is to be an independent third party which provides the guarantees. It is about image and prestige.
The hard question imho: Are such guarantees valuable enough? Do end users care enough that it is worth it?
Part of this is that researchers don't know how to launch it, and most are not entrepreneurial. Part of it is that many technology transfer groups are like dogs in a manger, toads squatting atop things they'll never put any effort into helping along, and whose job in life is to make it slow, expensive, and hard to deal with their IP. Part of it is that funds, VCs, and to some degree entrepreneurs sit around waiting for something to be handed to them, nicely packaged.
I think most of the fault is with the funds and the incubators. They have the money to craft a solution, to make a landing pad for scientist outreach, to give them a beacon to aim at. They can reach back into the research community to a much greater extend. They can build BDCs that increase the ratio of projects:entrepreneurs that can be tackled profitably. But very little of this actually happens.
My company, Repair Biotechnologies, has found two immensely promising technologies for human rejuvenation that have been in the first case dropped on the floor at the chasm of death, never carried forward, and in the second case died because the institutions involved couldn't convince their funding sources to back the incredible potential of the work. This happens. Many institutional sources of funding don't want to see biotech barnstorming, don't want to see imaginative, radical new directions. They shut it down.
All of this combines to form a dysfunctional environment in which knowledgable entrepreneurs can pick up truly revolutionary projects, but there really needs to be institutional change that only bigger organizations and wallets can bring to bear.
Solar power is mostly available in summer, but heating is mostly necessary in the winter. How do you store the energy for half a year? Apparently a big water tank underground is a great solution. It is also boring, non-sexy, and cheap. Thus there is little interest to commercialize it.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heat_pump
See my pub list: http://austinhenley.com/publications.html
Let me know what you would like to fund :)
https://www.ornl.gov/connect-with-ornl/for-industry/partners...
http://lanl.gov/business/business-opportunities/index.php
Edit: list of labs
https://science.energy.gov/laboratories/
https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/national-laboratories
Finding a way to change that calculation could open many paths to treatment.