Crowdfunding/DAO opensource pharma

1. Overview
Fleming Protocol is a decentralised, open-source drug discovery platform based on Cardano, where scientists can monetise & crowdfund their projects.

The aim is to be the Github for drug discovery innovation, with decentralised funding opportunities through crowdfunding and grants, ultimately translating impactful research into real-world treatments.

2. Fleming Protocol, key Dapp features

The key features of the Dapp will be:

2.1 Open source data sharing and collaboration:

• Ecosystem users can share and contribute to research and data shared on the open-source interface. Examples of data shared could be drug targets, molecules, predictive models, lab books
• Users can search and filter this information, which the platform aggregates and organises based on disease area, type of data and date shared. Users will receive updates as progress and requests are made on an area of their interest;

The collective intelligence will update the common knowledge of various diseases and lead to higher rates of innovation, faster and more efficiently

2.2 Monetisation

• Scientists can primarily do this by setting up an "augmented bonding curve" (ABC) smart contract. ABC's are a way of crowdfunding through issuing a unique (but fungible) token (and by extension, creating project-specific tokenomics) to donators and, in doing so, creating a self-sustaining project. Token price increases (algorithmically, as specified in the bonding curve mathematics) as supply increases (more donations to the fund increases the token supply). Token holders can take part in the governance of the project, and are paid rewards from the bonding curve collateral pool (managed by the smart contract)
• Another primary way of monetisation is through grants, scientists can submit proposals to the platform's governance DAO, which will distribute funds following an ecosystem vote. The funds will also be distributed as and when proposal milestones are met e.g. a $50K grant will distribute $25K for milestone 1 and, once achieved, distribute another $25K for milestone 2
• Finally, considerations will be made around how ADA staking pools can easily integrate with the crowdfunding process and receive additional incentives for doing so

Centralised initiatives such as Spark Stanford give proposals grant funding of around $50-100K, and they have around 3X the success of the pharma industry average. Fleming Protocol will be able to provide this, and more, when it reaches a mass scale

2.3 Attribution

• The nature of the Cardano blockchain will allow data contributions to be properly attributed to the originator, which will compliment licencing related to open source e.g. Creative Commons licence. This is key to protecting intellectual property in an open-source environment
• It will be key for Fleming Protocol to utilise Atala Prism's functionality e.g. to prove identity, proof of lab space, verified degree issuance etc, all of which will provide additional assurance to crowdfunders and open-source collaborators
• We will work with smart contracts legal protocols to ensure rights and claims of data sharers and donators are maintained

The building of the platform will factor in the lessons from previous crowdfunding platforms. The nature of Fleming's Protocol's design and approach will reduce "social waste," and an easily navigatable interface that will make decentralised interactions and collaboration fruitful.

3. Why is Fleming Protocol needed?

The pharma industry has undoubtedly delivered good to the world. Penicillin, insulin, smallpox vaccines, have saved billions of lives. Without Sir Alexander Fleming serendipitously discovering penicillin in 1928, 75% of people today would not be alive because their ancestors would have succumbed to infection.
However, the industry today has many problems, which can be surmised as follows:

3.1 Neglected Public Health

• Globally there are 10,000 diseases, only 500 of these have treatments
• 90% of research and development (R&D) spend is focused on 10% of the world's preventable deaths resulting in a significant unmet need

Around 2 billion people globally do not have access to treatment. This disproportionately affects the economically disadvantaged
Governments and citizens increasingly cannot afford new treatments

3.2 Poor Collaboration

• 85% of the $200B pharma R&D efforts are wasted, primarily because it's not shared publicly. Much could be gained if it was shared; repurposing drug research has a higher success rate and is more cost-effective than usual drug discovery
• In the face of the COVID-19, the necessity of open science was clear. Thousands of publications and molecules were shared in real-time. Many COVID-19 treatment developments came as a result of repurposing
• Increasingly, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is advocating for open science. Indeed, where more collaboration has taken place, it has led to vaccines being developed in record time, at one-tenth the cost, improving accessibility

Some argue that open-source would not result in a market-leading product. In reality, open-source has often led to market-leading innovation and products e.g. Linux, Google Chrome, Firefox, the software of the world's top 500 supercomputers.

3.3 Inefficient market

• Impactful discoveries aiming to tackle the worlds biggest public health burdens, fail to reach development and fall victim to the "valley of death," due to lack of funds from the traditional market
• The limited pool of public/philanthropic funds (which overwhelmingly fund this type of research) can only go so far
• There has been an exponential increase in drug R&D costs since the 1950s, "Erooms Law." The rate of new drugs to market has been stagnant over the same period
• Most new drugs add no therapeutic value and even reduce life expectancy
• The industry has suffered decades of declining return on investment

There is a diminishing pool of drug targets, it is mathematically improbable for the current pharma system to avoid a terminal decline

4. How decentralisation will solve these issues?

As it stands, the pharma industry is heavily centralised, both in terms of funding and investment decisions. This has led to many bad incentives and a severe lack of transparency. Decentralisation of both the funding and decision making is fundamental to overcoming the issues highlighted. It will allow for greater transparency and decentralised avenues of funding that doesn't rely on a centralised authority. Open source, decentralised blockchain will be needed to govern this. The autonomy of smart contracts and a DAO, which will form part of my proposed Dapp, can manage the crowdfunding and financial incentives at a mass scale, and help a community come to a consensus on how grants should be distributed. I plan to build into the governance a way of keeping key ecosystem members to account and incentivising things which advance the ecosystems aims of improving public health. Decentralisation with well thought out and flexible governance is the best way to keep this on track.

5. About me

I have 9+ years in the health and life sciences industry, which has involved me being in many senior leadership positions across strategy, finance and population health. For example, I have led on many large scale initiatives to improve healthcare in cancer, musculoskeletal conditions, radiology, IVF, COVID-19 etc. I have extensive experience advising public and private institutions in the U.K. on health policy, all of which resulted in improving patient care for millions of people.

I was selected to be on a top London based start-up accelerator in Oct 2020, which provided mentorship and helped to refine and develop Fleming Protocol. I've spoken to dozens of scientists, professors, drug development pioneers and potential users across the world (some of whom previously worked in big pharma or actively work in big pharma and lead large teams of scientists), all of whom will have links to institutions of potential users.

Along the way, I have gained prominent advisors based in open science and drug discovery, some of whom were insiders of the pharma industry who know the industry deeply and are keen to shake things up. Each of these individuals has decades of experience as scientists, professors, and as entrepreneurs.

Finally, I'm currently in discussions with a potential co-founder, who is a PhD with a background in physics, biophysics, neuroscience and machine learning. He is currently working as a research fellow in physics-inspired machine learning.

6. Next steps/Plans for the funding

I'm currently putting together a development plan with a team of developers. I'm looking for a co-founder (CTO) and devs if any of you are interested, or knows someone who might be interested :-)

This is an ambitious Dapp with a long term vision. The primary focus in the next few months will be to develop the open-source interface and the augmented bonding curve crowdfunding feature (and associated smart contract auditing). This would form the MVP which would take roughly 3-6 months to build and launch on the Cardano ecosystem. Design of the DAO governance will happen concurrently and launch later in the year.

Alongside encouraging adoption from ADA holders and establishing financial incentives for their platform engagement, Fleming Protocol will target adoption in the large open-source pharma community, who have links to universities and key institutions working on innovative discoveries. I have developed many key contacts across the world who can help with this.

Neglected diseases will be a key focus initially, it is an area with little attention from traditional markets but continues to contribute the most to global preventable death. Computational scientists will also be a target for adoption, as their work transcends many disease areas and is having a significant impact on the nature of drug discovery. Targeting computational scientists will encourage adoption from scientists across many disease areas.

Thank you for reading! I'd be happy to hear your thoughts (compliments and critique!) and answer any questions that you may have.

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