Insights and resources from the Molecule community

HairDAO, a BioDAO that is currently a part of the bio.xyz accelerator, had their first IP-NFT transaction. For $75k, HairDAO will gain access to the initial data from Dr. Ralf Paus’ lab Cutaneon. Then, based on the results, HairDAO may opt to test combinations of T3/T4 thyroid hormone at different dosages for an additional $50k.

On a recent episode of The DeSci Podcast, Vincent Weisser interviewed Vitalk Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum Foundation, to talk about the state of decentralized science today and its prospects for the future which led to an in-depth analysis of the potential curveballs and unknowns.

The future of research is collaborative, digital, and highly autonomous. Patents today are not. We are building the intellectual property system that will help usher in this new era.

In 2021, our team at Molecule published the first implementation of intellectual property NFTs (IP-NFTs). A solution that wraps intellectual property rights such as patents, datasets, or contractual agreements inside a non-fungible token, enabling easy transfer and collective ownership over such assets. Together with VitaDAO, we managed to demonstrate that this new asset class can be a viable investment instrument for biotech research.

We are pleased to announce that Molecule’s IP-NFT funding framework will facilitate critical preclinical work in Dr. Amit Sharma’s laboratory at the SRF Research Center to eliminate the accumulation of senescent cells in age-related diseases.

This episode of the Desci Podcast explores decentralized science with Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji discusses the Network State, an era of decentralized academia, decentralized media, and decentralized science, and the difference between "science" and actual science.

Today we’re excited to announce Molecule’s IP-NFT funding paradigm has crossed the ocean to support age-related oral health research at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Ethan Perlstein, a well-known biotech founder and rare diseases advocate recently posted on Twitter that: "once you get a taste of decentralized biotech "it’s hard to go back to the centralized carnival of yore." It's as though he was talking about decentralized science (DeSci) itself. No event gave you this feeling better than the recent DeSci.Berlin gathering.

Today, we are excited to announce that we have raised $12.7M in seed funding. Led by Northpond Ventures with participation from Shine Capital, 1kx, Fifty Years, KdT Ventures, BACKED VC, Inflection VC, Chris Leiter, Balaji Srinivasan, Zee Prime Capital, The LAO, L1 Digital, Boom Capital, Compound VC, Koji Capital, Pillar VC, Seedclub Ventures, Speedinvest, Healthspan Capital, BoxGroup and many others - we are now one step closer to creating a more equitable future for researchers and patients.

We are delighted to share that the laboratory of Evandro Fang at the Akershus University Hospital and the University of Oslo became the third ever lab to fund their research project via Molecule’s IP-NFT framework - The discovery of novel mitophagy activators for Alzheimer´s disease and healthy longevity.

Paul Kohlhaas visited the Podcast of Andrew Steinwald, and spoke about his path into the pharmaceutical space and web3. He shares his experiences in biohacking, the pharma industry, the drug development process and how web3 could play a crucial role in making drug development more efficient, fair and transparent. This is achieved through BioDAOs an open source approach of pharmaceutical early stage research and leveraging the traits of NFTs through and a new standard, the IP-NFT. Molecule is a company that is virtualizing and decentralizing how drug development works. They do this by attaching data and IP rights to non-fungible tokens (NFT's) and then bringing the core IP into web3. This makes the intellectual property liquid, which is very hard to achieve in biotech today, and also enables price discovery around IP. Molecule has created a curation market where people can trade and discover therapeutics for drugs. Molecule has also started building biotech DAOs, which are research collectives that are comprised of patients, investors, and researchers in a specific therapeutic area. The mission is to democratize access to medicine by empowering researchers and patients to become co-owners of the IP and data associated with a new therapeutic. Paul describes how the company's IP-NFTs work to store data associated with a new therapeutic and how they can be used to fractionalize ownership of the IP. He also walks through the company's roadmap and explains how they plan to decentralize ownership of the data and IP associated with a new therapeutic. Paul discusses the origins of VitaDAO and IP-NFT, the process of setting up a DAO, and the long-term vision for a DAO-based ecosystem for pharmaceutical research and development.The grand vision for the projects is to develop a drug that is enabled and discovered through the process and reaches patients in a eight to ten year timeframe. He also discusses the potential for IP-NFTs to be used to fractionalize the ownership of IP and allow patients to contribute funding to research."

TL;DR: This week, the first university biomedical intellectual property (IP) and research project was funded as an NFT (non-fungible token), enabled by a pioneering innovation at Molecule. The IP-NFT enables new fundraising and collaboration strategies for researchers by combining legal and technical frameworks with NFT technology. Early-stage research can be financed without endless grant applications, creating a startup and raising VC or needing to file a patent.

Throughout the past 2 weeks VitaDAO Token Holders got to vote on the proposal “VDP-5 Scheibye-Knudsen Lab Funding” to fund longevity at the Scheibye-Knudsen Lab in Copenhagen. The voting passed with 2.1M token votes and 88% of votes supporting the proposition. With the proposal having been approved by the DAO members, the lab in Copenhagen will receive $250.000 for the first research phase of the project over a period of 12 months. After successful completion and review of Phase 1 by the DAO, another $250.000 for an additional 12 months of research could be handed out to the lab. As part of this deal, VitaDAO will fully own the intellectual property (IP) resulting from the research project. The first biopharma IP that will be owned and managed by a DAO. Ownership and access management to the IP will be handled via Molecule’s novel IPNFT framework. The infrastructure is utilizing Ethereum ERC721, Arweave and Nevermined.

Globally, early-stage biopharma research suffers from chronic underfunding, leading to discontinued research in the early stages of the pharma development cycle. This is happening so regularly that academia has coined the phase of research up until clinical trials the “Valley of Death”. Researchers struggle to acquire funding due to three distinct reasons:Lack of visibility and connection to relevant investors: Researchers struggle to connect and acquire funding from private investorsLegal complexity of IP deals: Deals such as licence agreements surrounding pre-patent and patent IP are complex and often need legal supportDifficulty of determining the value of early-stage biopharma assets: Both funders and researchers have trouble assessing the value of early-stage research.NFTs have created an unprecedented revolution in the creative space, rethinking copyright, royalties and IP. We believe it will also be instrumental in solving the above-stated problems. In this article, we are going to focus on the first technical implementation of a biopharma IPNFT. It builds on many concepts other influential thinkers in the Web3 space have conjured in the past. For example, if you are interested in how general IP can be combined with NFTs, have a look at Trent McConaghy 3 part series on building IP NFTs with ERC721.

Imagine a world where patients directly fund researchers developing the next therapeutic breakthrough they need. One where drug development is collaborative, open, and decentralized — an open bazaar anyone with the right intentions can join. A system that could radically increase the diversity of treatments, and lower costs and time to market.

In a few short weeks, we will be launching one of our flagship longevity projects with the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Healthy Aging. Here, our Chief Scientific Officer, Tyler Golato, discusses why Molecule is doubling down on longevity.

We are currently facing one of the largest healthcare crises in modern history — and it’s far from over. The hunt for cures and vaccines for COVID-19 is forcing scientists, governments and the public at large to rethink our current biopharma innovation models. They’re too slow, too expensive and risky. But there’s hope, because the current focus on vaccine and drug development is unparalleled in history and with it, scientists across the globe are quickly developing new collaborative ways of working together. I believe this crisis will catalyze a paradigm shift for new business models in pharma and biotech. Open markets in which drugs can be approved on much shorter time frames and smaller budgets, bringing treatments to patients at a fraction of the current cost. This shift is unavoidable. And it will be facilitated by new digital platforms that drive open science. We will break away from the traditional paradigm in drug discovery — to frictionless data sharing without the commercial constraints of intellectual property.

At the beginning of this year, the world was a different place, unrecognizable compared to the world we inhabit today. Over the past three months, we have witnessed the fabric of society change in profound ways previously unfathomable. We are living through, perhaps, the defining event of our lifetimes, and we will be judged by the history books based on how well we respond to the challenge at hand.

The pharmaceutical industry is facing a wide variety of challenges, but perhaps the most pressing is the ongoing innovation crisis. Drug discovery rates are declining, the price of bringing a drug to market is increasing, and ROI on R&D is expected to hit 0% in the next few years. Taken together, these factors have a direct impact on the number and types of therapeutics being brought to market. In light of the capital requirements being so high, drug discovery represents a special challenge for its actors, especially pharmaceutical and biotech companies and universities. Compounding these problems, industry and academia struggle with an unprecedented reproducibility crisis. Today, two innovative companies have joined forces to fight these trends.

We decided to create an integration between the Ocean Protocol and Molecule Catalyst, to enable DAO like management of research data produced from the projects funded via Molecule Catalyst, as well as monetize the research data to improve the value of the Molecule Catalyst markets for contributors.

We are excited to announce the launch of the first application built for the Molecule Protocol on Ethereum Mainnet. Molecule Catalyst provides a platform for researchers working on novel therapeutics to raise funding from the public. Our mission is to democratize research funding and allow the public to engage with researchers while new discoveries are happening.

Molecule Catalyst is a crowdfunding platform for Scientific research, and we are excited to introduce you to the first project that we will be hosting! The project is in partnership with Rotem Petranker and Thomas Anderson, directors at the University of Toronto Mississauga Psychedelic Studies Research Program (PSRP), the pioneering group leading the study that will take a look at the effects of microdosing psilocybin.

We recently announced Molecule Catalyst and outlined more details about the technical architecture powering the system. Providing a novel crowdfunding route for researchers, it will be one of the first decentralized applications utilizing token bonding curves for fundraising. We conducted rigorous modelling and ran various simulations to find suitable parameters and ensure that the system is as robust as possible before releasing it into the wild. This article provides some first insights into this process and highlights the importance of thorough token engineering practices when building platforms that leverage the power of novel decentralized ledger technologies. — By Ben Scholtz & Titian Steiger.

Launching your first product is no easy venture. Long hours, endless task lists and self-doubt are just a few elements involved in bringing your idea to life. The way you approach all these challenges is what will ultimately determine the success of your launch.

We recently announced the release of our first iteration of the Molecule platform, Catalyst, an initiative offering novel funding mechanisms for research projects. By tokenizing a fundraising initiative, each project becomes a tradeable market where users contribute to research in underfunded areas of science and directly invest in the success of the campaign. Unlike existing crowdfunding platforms, Catalyst offers incentive-driven fundraising where backers can potentially earn a return on their contribution.This article outlines the architecture of our application, delving into how we are leveraging token engineering concepts to benefit the future of health and medicine through funding research.