A burgeoning Decentralized Science (DeSci) movement is changing the landscape of the biopharmaceutical industry, enabling the formation of patient and researcher-centric communities and underpinned by the ethos of open source.
We're all familiar with Moore's Law -- the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubling roughly every two years, which roughly describes the exponential growth in computing power we've seen over time. Eroom's Law (Moore's Law, the other way around) states that, despite technological advances, drug development is getting slower and more expensive. While technologies such as high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry, and computational drug design can increase the speed of innovation, other system- and institutional-level issues hinder progress, such as increased regulatory burdens, lack of open-source technology sharing, and misallocation of capital by incumbent companies, impeding progress. This prevents new drugs from entering the market and therefore hinders patients.
A potential explanation for this trend is the failure of capital and resource coordination, combined with the monopoly intellectual property model that prevails in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. These patterns inhibit information sharing and collaboration, confuse data production, and create contradictions in experimental results. While new laboratory technologies alone will not improve the efficiency of drug development, we believe that new advances in networking, coordination and incentive technologies at the structural level can reverse this trend with new approaches to optimize collaboration, talent and capital allocation.
Biotechnology and pharma have historically been centralized as large corporations and organizations, lacking the incentive to work in an open and collaborative manner. In other words, pharmaceutical companies have a "closed source" culture. The trend of decentralization is to overthrow the centralized entities that monopolize the power and move to a coexisting network of collaborators in a flat hierarchical structure.
Decentralized communities achieve common goals by sharing pre-competitive resources within the community. They promote an open source culture to their members and encourage them to collaborate using token-based mechanisms.
Decentralized networks provide a trustless environment in which data coordination is improved, weaknesses are reduced, and resource distribution is optimized at scale. In the context of biotechnology, this means creating new organizational structures, with low barriers to entry (e.g. logging into Discord), with built-in collaboration and incentives (WAGMI) that can coordinate data from any participant (even a the general public and patients) funding and work. These features come in the form of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
DAOs are relatively new smart contract-based entities capable of coordinating capital, talent, and swarm intelligence on an unprecedented scale. More recently, a new Decentralized Science (DeSci) movement has rapidly changed the way science and biotechnology are coordinated by leveraging DAOs (see VitaDAO, PsyDAO, labDAO), and Molecule is increasingly positioned as a core infrastructure provider in the field .
The DeSci movement is currently forming a talent pool for entrepreneurial researchers and leading thinkers in biotech innovation who are frustrated with the status quo, whether it be funding, coordination, collaboration, or anything else that impacts young entrepreneurs in biotech and scholarly system problems. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocates only 2% of its funding to scientists under the age of 36, while scientists 36 and older will receive 98% of the funding. Among other things, this trend has led to enough frustration that several new tissue types, such as FROs and DAOs, have emerged, aiming to revolutionize the field of biotechnology. But what exactly is a DAO? Why is it important and how will it change biotechnology?
Let's start understanding biotech DAOs by understanding the steps to create a DAO and what they do. A suitable starting point for a biotech DAO is a clear vision and mission - what can these new, open organizational frameworks achieve? Biotech DAOs can coordinate talent, enable decentralized funding and governance, or help create standardized data collection and generation methods, among others. They can be charitable or for-profit. While biotech DAOs have unlimited design space, their key innovations lie in their lack of gatekeeping and the use of technology to coordinate decision-making in large communities.
All biotech DAOs have one thing in common: they solve a problem hitherto unsolvable due to the lack of incentives for broad collaboration in the biotech space.
To understand this better, we can take an example - VitaDAO, the first biotech DAO born from Molecule. VitaDAO is focused on funding early-stage preclinical drug development in the context of longevity. When designing VitaDAO, Molecule's goals were:
Create a Schelling point and community-building event at the intersection of longevity and Web3, enabling researchers and the public to gather and participate in research and funding.
Fund cutting-edge, high-impact research in academia and help translate this research into effective medicines
Creating a sustainable organization as a function of its commercial efforts, the proceeds from these efforts provide an ongoing funding mechanism for longevity science.
The third point, "a sustainable organization as a function of its commercial endeavours" requires the DAO to derive monetary value from its funding endeavours. To this end, VitaDAO leverages Molecule's IP-NFT framework, which allows DAOs to own, license, and trade intellectual property generated from projects it supports. VitaDAO is committed to funding early-stage research in academia and commercializing it. The DAO owns the IP generated by the projects it funds. For the first time, a large, decentralized community of researchers and patients has gained value.
NFTs allow us to capture various asset types, including IP rights and data, and manage them natively in web3. Web3 allows these assets to exist in cyberspace, which means that no matter what country you are in, you can interact with them in some way, across borders, time zones and jurisdictions. This is a big step towards democratizing access to these assets. NFTs can be transferred to another wallet, tokenized, staked and borrowed, sold on the NFT marketplace, and they can be programmed so that each time the NFT is resold, the original creator automatically receives royalties.
At Molecule, the pioneering IP-NFT framework connects IP and data to NFTs, turning IP into a new highly liquid, tradable asset class, connecting the web3 with the real world. The design here is in the early stages, and these new tools will need to stand the test of time and courts. Early data shows that these approaches work.
VitaDAO is the first design of a biotech DAO. One of Molecule's core goals is to create a productized biotech DAO framework, allowing anyone to build their own biotech DAO, operate on it, and start leveraging a large, open community to achieve their goals. To this end, Molecule is seeking to collaborate with motivated researchers, patient groups, entrepreneurs, community builders and visionaries who are interested in building at the intersection of biotechnology x web3.
We imagine these structures will be tools for shaping communities of patients and researchers. Imagine a patient- and researcher-centric Bio dao focused on Alzheimer's disease research, specific types of cancer or diabetes, with patient and researcher interactions across the entire end-to-end drug development process from funding to licensing There is a tight feedback loop and collaboration.
At Molecule, we believe our core responsibility is to help builders in the following areas:
Enabling biotech DAO builders to take advantage of our IP-NFT legal licensing framework and DAO organization framework. We will support their efforts to collaborate with academics through Molecule’s marketplace.
Funding from the right source. We will provide liquidity and support to the project in the form of grants and token swaps. WAGMI.
Provides a talent pool that can move between DAOs, helping to build and guide all components of a DAO: finance, governance, operations, strategy, marketing, education, and search/assessment. We have a network of researchers, entrepreneurs, builders, biotech VCs and enthusiasts to help build the best possible organization.
Help build robust global legal frameworks appropriate for specific biotech and patient-focused DAO communities, such as the for-profit LAO framework pioneered by Tribute Labs or the non-profit Swiss association.
PsyDAO will be the second biotech DAO released by Molecule with the ultimate goal of democratizing psychedelics. We aim to achieve this core goal through several related pathways. The first is to bring together researchers, opinion leaders, enthusiasts and spiritual leaders to work together to determine the future of psychedelic research. Together, the group will fund psychedelic research in exchange for ownership of intellectual property that will be open source and available for use or commercialization by all. A key goal is to strive to keep psychedelic intellectual property from being monopolized by leading the industry or by buying open intellectual property before it is patented. For example, this design principle is slightly different from that of VitaDAO.
Others in the ecosystem are also starting to build biotech DAOs that function quite differently, not just money. A prime example here is LabDAO. LabDAO is building a community-owned and operated platform for scientific laboratory services, protocol exchange and data sharing. These organizations have a high potential for interoperability and collaboration.
You can imagine a scenario where organizations like VitaDAO acquire assets from Molecule's discovery marketplace in the form of IP-NFTs. VitaDAO funds early preclinical experiments to eliminate risk. Once positive data emerged and new experiments were required, possibly beyond the scope of the funded lab, LabDAO (a community of labs) stepped in to coordinate downstream development efforts and experiments through other academic labs and CROs. Decentralized drug development is starting to take shape. Additionally, IP-NFTs allow different contributors (such as LabDAO members) to acquire ownership of IP in exchange for work. These organizations began to form a modular, decentralized pipeline of drug development, each leveraging its strengths and being rewarded for their contributions.
All of these pieces come together to begin to form the basis of a collaborative, open and inclusive ecosystem that has the potential to permeate and change monopoly behavior in the biotech space to better serve the interests of patients and researchers. This is the beginning of a new field of biotechnology, and this is only the first day.
We want to help all who share our dream of an open drug system. Currently, we are helping to build biotech DAOs like:
VitaDAO - Focused on funding longevity research
PsyDAO - Focused on funding psychedelic research
Drug Repurposing DAOs like Crowdfunding Cure
The DAO for the Rare Disease Community
At Molecule we offer:
DAO and web3 framework
Community of Practice Development Strategies
legal framework
Token Economy Design
fluidity
We intend to provide DAOs with funding and liquidity so that they can compete with the current VC and pharma models.
Also be sure to visit LabDAO - one of the most exciting new players in the DeSci community.
This is the first day. Build the future of biotechnology with us.