We speak to Savva Kerdemelidis and Nicholas Fiorenza, founders of Crowd Funded Cures about alternative financing models for clinical trials and drug development in general.
Grants and especially patents have long been the predominant mechanisms for securing financing for novel treatment. IP law shapes the incentive structure of the life sciences industry - creating suboptimal behavior and leaving value on the table.
We speak about unmonopolizable treatment and repurposing off-label and natural drugs. Since these do not fit into the predominant model, they do not undergo the same rigorous clinical research as patentable drugs. It is a market failure, since there are no incentives to conduct this research when no pathways exist for recovering the cost.
The potential is large, since most of the drugs prescribed to patients are off-patent. An example is ketamine, which is available off-label for treating severe depression and is currently more effective than it’s patented counterpart.
Prizes, pay-for-success contracts, advance market commitments, social impact bonds and subscriptions have been debated and tested to a limited degree as alternatives to patents.
The blockchain technology is showing promise in re-inventing IP with the emergence of Decentralized Science (DeSci) and IP Non-fungible Tokens (NFT). With blockchain technology the transaction costs are reduced and pay-for-success models are given scale.
We also speak about how the current model is disempowering for scientists, who are either forced to go into academia or join the industry. Both choices have significant drawbacks, especially considering that the low-hanging fruit for small molecules is likely already picked.
Guests:
Savva Kerdemelidis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/savvak/
Nicholas Fiorenza: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholascharlesfiorenza/
Crowd Funded Cures: https://crowdfundedcures.org/
Notes:
DeSci (DEcentralized SCIence) A Web3 (crypto) term for blockchain-based activities involving scientific research.
DAO decentralized autonomous organization is a system developed to distribute decision-making, management, and entity ownership.
Pay for success contracts: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pay-success-contracts-new-model-develop-therapies-from-/?trackingId=SKff3hMRTtcMWn3xBMFFSw%3D%3D
Evergreening: reformulating a drug to extend patent life.
Vita DAO https://www.vitadao.com/
Molecule https://molecule.to/
PsyDAO https://psydao.io/
Cherubs DAO: https://cherubsdao.com/
LabDAO https://www.labdao.xyz/
Enantiomers are pairs of compounds with exactly the same connectivity, but opposite three-dimensional shapes.
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