Health incentives gone wrong. Can Crypto, DAO, NFT Fix Them

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talking to Zuzalu.John Cumbers.

Going to the doctor’s office today doesn’t always conjure up the word care. Visits are often rushed, with endless phone calls and efforts to access information online, complicating an already depersonalized process. Transferring information between health care providers is a Herculean task, truly matched only by the effort required to obtain the necessary referrals from one physician to another.

For Paul Kohlhaas and Vincent Weisser of Molecule, these are just symptoms of a larger problem: the extent to which profit has become a deciding factor in medicine, if not the deciding factor. With a high-level goal of curing diseases, they are more interested in the question of how to fix a broken market, starting with addressing the lack of data liquidity. Before speaking at next week’s SynBioBeta conference, they shared some key insights into their overall thinking.

Our thesis is that the best way to address these issues is to engage patients as a platform to drive and fund research. So we see Molecule as a Kickstarter-like marketplace for translation work for these communities, says Weisser, director of ecosystem development. In other words, to solve problems in the doctor’s office, Molecule wants to put patients in the driver’s seat when it comes to the very data that allows them to be treated.

Molecule isn’t just a Kickstarter release for biology. More definitively, it is a conglomeration of decentralized autonomous organizations (more commonly known as DAOs) that revolves around a cryptocurrency protocol that decentralizes funding and ownership of intellectual property. By using this protocol and its instruments specifically, IP-NFTs or non-fungible intellectual property tokens to tokenize sponsored research agreements, Molecule aims to make these aspects of the research process more transferable and liquid. Data and data science talent is illiquid, and that’s a technology problem, says Weisser. How can we find knowledge without giving up proprietary elements? Moving data rooms from the paper age to the digital age is one of them. Instead of more centralized information-sharing agreements, these IP-NFTs are designed to encourage participation and collaboration in a much larger environment with more built-in liquidity, without having to patent innovations along the way.

Kohlhaas, as co-founder and CEO of Molecule, cites his background in economics and his interest in systems thinking and design as the basis for his understanding of the problems arising from the centralization of authorities in terms of funding, replication, concurrency and communication. The incentives for bringing drugs to market are not to cure but to treat people and build sustainable business models around medicine, he argues. So in response to that, we can attach IP rights to a research agreement with an NFT as the digital carrier of that asset so that it’s easier to transact with the IP, rather than of needing to use an equity vehicle. Given how the system works, it is a mechanism for faster funding and more valuable scientific assets that can be easily traded.

Molecule team.

Molecule.

This focus on IP and funding is the foundation for a variety of thriving communities, aligned with specific incentives while coming from diverse backgrounds, to spin the wheel of IP generation translation, for additional funding to continue the research. This platform approach aims to bring patients, researchers, and investors together to own and manage intellectual property through these tokens taking back control of the doctor’s office visit.

Part of this governance exercise is being able to prioritize what types of research to pursue, and one of those neglected areas for Molecule is longevity research. Treating aging is like a vaccine. It’s important to be open to new paradigms for treating disease, and crypto-based communities are one step ahead of the medical establishment in being able to see where things might go, Weisser argues. We could end up with cheaper drugs if you treat the root cause of the disease as opposed to the fragmented diseases that you might otherwise get, for example, many different cancers.

Concretely within Molecule, this emphasis on longevity has taken the form of VitaDAO. Its members include people who contribute financially or time in the form of work; in return, they receive governance tokens that allow them to vote on proposed research projects, for example. Membership based on contributed work is one of the ways this Bio DAO differs from other investment DAOs, and the infrastructure is designed to prioritize people as patients over more traditional shareholders or other forms of stakeholders.

Users must participate in a trustless system, says Kohlhaas. This type of work reduces the risk of systemic failure and fatal error by focusing on shared values ​​and autonomy through a token economy. For Weisser and Kohlhaas, some of these changes in how humans interact with human health only herald the future benefits of the broader decentralized science (or DeSci) movement. Overall, what we’re trying to do is study what’s wrong with science funding and figure out how to fix it, Weisser points out. It’s too bureaucratic, slow and centralized, so we need to make it as fast, digital, easy and unbureaucratic as possible. Instead of having things centrally owned by a government agency, it’s by a community that cares and wants to bring things to market.

In the world of Molecule, the space for multiple communities to thrive is already taking shape with various research DAOs. Using a set of best accelerator-like principles to build more efficiently in web3, bio.xyz worked with Molecule to help launch Bio DAO around synthetic biology, hair loss, psychedelics, health women, etc It’s not just a moral problem, it’s an economic problem, Kohlhaas points out. I want to live in a Star Trek world. How can we get there? How do you access abundance? The molecule is certainly pointing the way to that kind of future, one atom of community at a time.

Thanks to Aishani Aatresh for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about, including Molecule, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

I’m the founder and CEO of SynBioBeta, the leading community of innovators, investors, engineers, and thinkers who share a passion for using synthetic biology to build a better, more sustainable universe. I publish the weekly SynBioBeta Digest, host the SynBioBeta podcast, and wrote Whats Your Biostrategy?, the first book to anticipate how synthetic biology will disrupt virtually every industry in the world. I also founded BetaSpace, a space colony innovation network and community of visionaries, technologists and investors accelerating the industries necessary to sustain human life here and off planet. I’ve been involved in several startups, I’m an operating partner and investor in the Data Collective hard tech investment fund, and I’m a former bioengineer at NASA. I completed my PhD in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University and am from the UK.

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