Dr. Marik’s home university, EVMS, is currently raising money for an RCT of his sepsis treatment.
You can donate as a private individual here.
Remember, the whole thing only costs $250,000 — a few people can make a significant dent in that. The response from my preliminary survey was great, and we clearly have a lot of generous people interested in the sepsis issue.
For my own record-keeping, I’d appreciate it if people who saw this blog post and donated would fill out this form; I’d like to be able to congratulate my blog readers on our total amount raised.
Otium 
Let’s say that this accelerates the validation process by a half year in expectation, and that the RCT has a 15% chance of resulting in halving the rate of sepsis deaths. That amounts to 300,000 * 0.5 * 0.15 * 0.5 = 11,250 deaths prevented – about $22 per. Even assuming lots of other inputs raise the cost by an order of magnitude, and assuming that people who die of sepsis are disproportionately weaklings who’d have died in a year anyway, that’s about $222/life-year, which is pretty good. And that’s pretty aggressively deflated, I think.
I wish there was a “total amount donated” on the website so people would know to stop donating once the study is fully funded.
I’m quite in agreement with this. Indeed I am discouraged from donating in the absence of such a total.
Just gave 300. Will be able to arrange corporate matching for another 300. So credit yourself for 600.
❤
I feel like it’s not rare these days that I see things via social media of the form “doctor is raising money privately for promising but underfunded intervention”. See e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/todd-rider-draco-crowdfunding-broad-spectrum-antiviral-2015-12 as an example of the one I feel like I saw earliest and most frequently. Can anyone offer me thoughts on (1) a framework with which to evaluate these claims / donation requests, and (2) some systematic way of tracking how they come out in the end, for calibration?
What happens if they don’t make it to $250,000 via donations? (My guess was that they’ll still do the trial, but it will take longer as they’ll need to get the remaining money some other way.) What happens if they go over? (My guess was that they’ll make the trial larger, which would mean faster/stronger results, though with diminishing marginal returns for further donations.)
I currently intend to donate the amount I said I would in the survey, and also advertise this to my finance friends. But I’d like to know a bit more information first, if it is at all possible.
I’ve just asked the Gifts Officer at the university that — will let you know what she says!
“If we are unable to raise the funding goal for the clinical study, the monies raised would be used to fund sepsis research at EVMS (most likely basic science research). If we exceed the goal, the extra monies raised would still be restricted to sepsis research at EVMS (either clinical or basic science). All gifts made to the EVMS Foundation that are restricted for sepsis research will be used for that purpose. If for some reason we are unable to fulfill the wishes of the donors, we would then contact the donors regarding their gift before utilizing the funds for another purpose.”
Thanks! It’s a little less focused on the specific goal of the trial than I had hoped, but it still sounds pretty reasonable.
Hey, this looks really promising to me, to the point where I’m considering a major donation here, but funding medical research is something I haven’t looked into very closely at all. Right now, my two biggest pieces of uncertainty are:
1) To what extent is donating here just funging against medical research in general/why couldn’t this be funded by the normal grant system?
2) If this study succeeds, and shows this does dramatically decrease sepsis mortality, how likely is it that medical institutions will change their practices, and how quickly?
Also, are there any particular deadlines for funding this, and will EVMS actually let us know when it’s fully funded? Also, let me know if there are any EA-type frameworks for evaluating this sort of thing that you know of, and thanks a ton for your research!