All of Mats Olsen's Comments + Replies

Hi Matthew, thanks for engaging and for your thoughtful comments/questions. 

1. In non-pandemic times, yes. Australia has less requirements for a IND-type submission (GMP certificate only needed prior to enrollment, not at submission); you only need the HREC approval (IRB equivalent) and no national regulatory approval (just a rubber stamp); and depending on the indication and competitive pressures you usually get faster enrollment. 
2. Agreed. I was talking more about regulatory speed to get into FIH.
3. You can still get a pre-IND meeting with US regulator

As an ex-Alvean and also 15-year industry veteran I can maybe weigh in, particularly because I think this ties in to what was Alvea's main value proposition: speed for pandemic response. There were some aspects that enabled Alvea to go faster than a "from-scratch", hypothetical vaccine program: Alvea based its DNA-Omicron vaccine on an existing, approved vaccine platform (ZyCoV-D), and applied to SAPHRA instead of FDA/EMA. 

But even trying to account for that, Alvea went faster than any company I'd seen that wasn't in early COVID pandemic-speed (with t... (read more)

Just a quick update on this project (8 Oct 2023):

We decided to close the project in 2022 for two main reasons:

1. We looked at engagement metrics and calculated how much throughput of volunteers and projects we would need to achieve a take-off trajectory on this metaproject and concluded it would take much active effort, partnerships and acceptance of the wider EA community.  Given that this was a volunteer project we thought the odds of this happening were low.  
2. CEA also communicated with us that they were considering including something similar in

Great initiative. Whoever ends up in this role, we at impactcolabs.com would love to connect as we could both help identify potential candidates as well as help identify needs within EA orgs. We find that many EA orgs have volunteer needs that might be best served by a PA-type FTE. We will hopefully share more about these findings and the status of our 2.0 platform soon.

This is a great initiative! I help run Impact CoLabs that hosts many organization and projects in need of different types of expertise, tech expertise being a very common one. If you ever have free time, please reach out at info@impactcolabs.com as we can connect you with high-impact projects in need. We welcome you (and anyone else) to also fill out a volunteer profile so organizations can find you directly as well. Thanks again for doing this with you free time!

Thank you for the feedback! You found a blindspot that most of us at Impact CoLabs and those we asked to review this post had, namely that we all had a concept in our mind for what a project platform was. I have adjusted the snapshot to hopefully aid in explaining the concept in general, but please let me know if this still doesn't address your issue.

Thank you for the kind words and the great feedback! You make a great point about 'volunteering', we will discuss that internally. I'm generally in agreement with your comments but would love to explore some of the nuance! Look forward to hearing form you, if you reach out and don't hear back, please message me here to make sure we are being responsive.

Hi Denis, thank you for your message and your offer to contribute, it is welcome. Since we are just starting out we still haven't built all the capabilities we have envisioned. For example, and as mentioned above, we were planning a list of tractable problems and project ideas to guide potential project leaders, as well as a list of past/failed projects or lessons learned from projects to ensure the community as a whole is not just spinning its wheels (e.g. this metaproject has had similar iterations in the past..). But your idea for a wiki that not onl... (read more)

Thanks Jan! Yes, we even reference your post in our detailed write-up and agree that vetting will be critical and a bottle-neck to maximum positive impact, particularly related to x-risk. Currently we have implemented a plan that we believe is manageable exclusively by a small group of volunteers, and have included a step in the process that involves CEA's Community Health team. Having said that, we don't think that is an ideal stopping point, we hope to expand into other forms of vetting pending general interest in the project, vetting volunteer intere... (read more)

Fantastic analysis, wish I had this prior to making my decision. Back in the day both Fidelity and Schwab had a $5K minimum and Fidelity had a $50 minimum contribution whereas Schwab had a $500 minimum, which is why I went with Fidelity. Glad to see they made these improvements.

Going off of Dan's comment, if a Fidelity (or Schwab) account is at $25K or more, would you recommend switching over to Vanguard given the better fees and investment options?