Talk:Open Medicine Institute

Connection to OMF? -- EscapeTheFog (talk) 21:45, June 10, 2019 (EDT)

Does anyone whether Open Medicine Institute has an official connection/affiliation with Open Medicine Foundation? Andy Kogelnik is director of OMI, and IIRC per a video interview of Linda Tannenbaum he cofounded OMF as well. I would imagine OMF has also provided research grants to OMI; though I don't have a reference for this at the moment. But beyond these things, it's unclear to me if OMI has greater affinity to OMF than other research institutions as the common "Open Medicine" phrase would imply. Either way, this seems like information worth including in the article if we can get clarity on it.

Great question. I can share my understanding, but I’m not sure there is any reference to back up my understanding. Andreas Kogelnik founded both OMI and OMF after leaving Montoya’s group at Stanford, where OMF was to be the non-profit fundraising entity and OMI was to be the quasi-for-profit research and treatment entity. The idea was probably to use a non-profit to raise funds from charitable donors and to use the quasi-for-profit to raise funds from Silicon Valley investors. The “Open Medicine” term was probably a marketing term to appeal to investors familiar with the term “Open-source software”. He raised 5-7 million dollars from Silicon Valley investors before he was mysteriously forced aside at OMF in favor of Ron Davis. A couple years later, the clinicians he had hired at the OMI clinic left, leaving Kogelnik alone. Again, just my understanding, no known reference...

Pyrrhus (talk) 22:18, June 10, 2019 (EDT)

Thanks for the context, Pyrrhus. 01:04, June 11, 2019 (EDT)