Africa Opensource Pharma & Medicine

De-Fi platform leveraging stake pools to crowdfund open-source drug/medical projects, where scientific collaboration & governance is central

Extensive exp in health/life sciences, academia, & deep understanding of the industry. Several scientific/tech advisors with decades of exp.

1. Overview
Fleming Protocol is a decentralised, open-source drug discovery ecosystem that connects scientists, crowd investors and institutions, enabling the most impactful research to be translated into real-world therapeutics and devices. We believe that such a platform will have tremendous utility in helping Africa overcome its shortfall in pharma/medical R&D and production.
The open-source nature will allow open access to trained scientist within Africa, who can share their expertise in one central respiratory, but also utilise a growing global network of leading scientists/institutions e.g. Inserm, Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI), University of Paris, independent scientists from the citizen science-based JOGL platform, and members/institutions associated with the Open Source Pharma Foundation.

Fleming's cryptoeconomics will present new funding opportunities for open-source R&D, making such efforts sustainable over the long term. Our focus on Africa will allow Cardano stakeholders, with an interest in the region, to support R&D projects that have the potential to create a self-sustaining industry within the continent, and thus reducing Africa's disease burden.
Our ambition is to leverage capital generated from the Fleming ecosystem to jump-start local R&D, provide generic drug manufacturing capabilities and ancillary methods to create safe, effective and available local sources.

We are developing this ecosystem in close collaboration with academic scientists as well as citizen science organisations, e.g. the University of Cape-Town and the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) in Paris. This will allow us to build and adapt the infrastructure to host projects ranging from small community-based solutions to large academic drug discovery efforts. These R&D projects would be within the realm of conditions that burden the continent the most.

2. Challenges
Africa is a rapidly developing continent with much potential utilisation for the technology seen on Cardano. Whilst this is so, the continent has a pressing need for medical therapeutics and technology. The continent, just 17% of the world's population, bears a disproportionate 25% of the global disease burden. Africa carries 90% of the global cases of malaria and 25% of the world's tuberculosis cases.

The COVID-19 pandemic has threatened to reverse the extraordinary gains made against epidemics in Africa, the annual death toll across its epidemic diseases could nearly double, wiping out years of progress.This is compounded by a lack of access to essential medicines. It is estimated that at least one-third of the world's population lacks access to essential medicines. In poorer areas of Africa, this figure is as high as 50%.

The reasons for the above can largely be surmised as follows:

Lack of investment

Despite bearing a disproportionately large share of the global disease burden, the African markets remain unattractive to the pharma industry. Research has found that 90% of the $200M spent globally on drug R&D, are for lucrative 'western' markets. More than 97% of R&D activity occurred in developed countries. Over many decades, only 1.3% of the 1,556 new chemical entities registered were meant for use in tropical diseases and tuberculosis, despite these diseases accounting for a substantial amount of the global disease burden, mostly in the African continent.

Historically, the governments in African have struggled to prioritise funding for drug R&D, further compounding the issue of a lack of investment.

Lack of local infrastructure

Africa's capacity for pharma R&D and local drug production is among the lowest globally despite having well-trained researchers. The sustainability of the African pharmaceutical supply remains highly contingent on foreign funding and manufacturing.

Nonetheless, there is evidence of pharmaceutical innovation in Africa, however, when these capabilities are utilised, they are mostly funded by external funders who dictate what research to conduct (in ways that often deviate from the continents most pressing needs).

Africa's capacity for drug discovery innovation is further hampered by the lack of a centralised repository for this innovation. Knowledge on the topic is shared within the circles of specialists involved in particular steps of pharmaceutical innovation, but rarely outside each specific group. This aversion to sharing information has been counterproductive in the realm of drug discovery, and even commercial outcomes.

3. Funding pharma R&D through Fleming Protocol's crypto-economics
We're proposing several methods to fund open-source R&D projects. These methods will need extensive beta testing amongst our early pilot projects to ensure that the incentives are correct and can scale:

Cardano Stakepool Operators grants
As noted by Cardano community members, Cardano stake pools have access to substantial amounts of capital. Fleming Protocol is currently engaging with enthusiastic Cardano Stakepool operators to pioneer a new way for some of this capital to go to worthwhile, open-source R&D projects, providing financial incentives to stake pools in return. This will involve setting up a smart contract that ensures ADA flows directly to the Fleming ecosystem, which will distribute to open-source R&D projects. The stake pool operator will receive project token rewards in exchange.

Over time we will build the FlemingDAO (decentralised autonomous organisation), which will have an important role in governing the ecosystem. A key part of the FlemingDAO will be its grants system. Similar to how Gitcoin provides grants to open-source projects, or how Catalyst provides grants to Cardano proposals, we will create a grant system for drug R&D projects in Africa, leveraging capital from the Cardano ecosystem (e.g. stake pools). This will be the world's first medical crypto grant system, and getting the governance correct will again take extensive beta testing with early pilot projects and users.

Holders of the $OSP (Open Science Protocol) governance token participate in FlemingDAO's governance. For example, voting (or delegating voting power) to decide which R&D projects proposals receive DAO grants. Token holders will also receive financial/staking incentives based on their participation and the number of tokens that they own.

Crowdfunding via philanthropic donations
Users can directly contribute to projects using ADA or stablecoins, to provide funds to R&D projects they want to see translated from research to approved therapeutics/medical devices. The mechanism that we aim to use ("token bonding curves") will provide incentives to donors, which will leverage network efforts and liquidity pools in a way that results in more donations and higher funds raised to the R&D project in question (for more on this concept please see the following article: https://tokeneconomy.co/on-bonding-curves-and-charitable-giving-9bf74b9343d2).

Donators are further incentivised by receiving $OSP governance tokens, which grants them proportional financial/staking incentives as well as ecosystem governance abilities.

Future monetisation for scientists and token holders
In the future, our ambition is to provide scientists with a licencing scheme where they can commercialise their intellectual property (IP). This would happen by converting the project's data, results and having their IP represented as an NFT (non-fungible token) on the blockchain. The NFT, representing an open-source licence, can be purchased and traded by people who want to commercialise the R&D, for example, a generic drug manufacturer to sell therapeutics. The sale of the NFT and associated royalties will provide the scientists and their supporters the ability to monetise their IP, in a trustless way.

Whilst we plan to develop these methods in future, we are aware of the rapidly changing and uncertain regulatory environment around cryptocurrency, and regulatory complexity around academical intellectual property. This will require careful consideration and we will be actively discussing this with legal experts. We will align our future monetisation methods accordingly. We are confident that academic institutions and project leads will, given they receive considerable amounts of funding, be accomodating for this.

4. Our engagement with the Africa ecosystem
We are actively speaking with various institutions and key figures within the African drug discovery ecosystem to develop partnerships. These include:

• Professor Kelly Chibale from the University of Cape Town/H3D. He teaches Organic Chemistry and is their chair of drug discovery at the university. He also runs H3D, which is a drug discovery and development centre which is pioneering drug discovery in Africa (mostly focused on TB, malaria, antimicrobial resistance) and has many partnerships across the world

• Kumasi Hive based in Ghana, conduct biotechnology research critical to solving challenges in Ghanaian communities. They provide co-learning space for training and rapid prototyping of ideas in biology into enterprising solutions

• MRC in Gambia, one of two research units established in sub- Saharan Africa, who aim to deliver innovative, world-leading research aimed at reducing the burden of illness and death in low and middle-income countries

Through our connections, we're looking to contact other African universities, key members of African governments, health institutions (e.g. the Africa CDC) and more. It is key for us to work closely with such institutions as we want to collaboratively develop an ecosystem that provides benefit to their native scientists and, ultimately, their population.

Our goal is to pilot therapeutic/medical R&D projects which serve Africa and tackle the most pressing challenges (e.g. we are in talks with scientists leading on impactful tuberculosis and DNA/COVID-19 related R&D projects). We will also provide the means for African scientists to collaborate with our open-source, global network of academic institutions and independent scientists. We will provide innovative funding opportunities to such projects, and a means for its contributors to benefit financially from the intellectual property that they develop.

5. An example pilot project

Peer-to-peer biological tools for decentralised drug discovery
Our academic partners have developed a low-cost and scalable drug discovery platform using the synthetic biology toolbox, which expresses protein targets of interest in the common laboratory bacterium E. coli, which is genetically modified in such a way that the protein target is required for growth. Potential drugs that kill the modified bacterium, but not an unmodified bacterium, are likely to act on the external target. The system allows many thousands of potential targets to be screened in a way that is low-tech, cheap, and safe.

Biological tools can extend the power of digital networks into the physical world. Like software, genetically modified microbes can be replicated and shared almost for free. This property makes our system ideal for highly distributed efforts of drug discovery, in which many teams share the work of testing for new drugs against a particular target. This is particularly valuable in the case of targets relevant for neglected diseases, in which many low-resource labs are highly motivated but cannot alone match the screening power of a traditional, centralized pharma facility.

Cardano can be a tool to support collaborative drug discovery efforts for the public good. We propose a model in which funding agencies designate high priority drug screens and incentivise them with pre-allocated payment structures. A distributed network of labs then self-selects to perform the work of preparing drug libraries, shipping microbial strains, screening portions of the total library, and replicating the results of other groups. Each of these actions is supported by Cardano-mediated micropayments and frugal biotechnologies that allow individual labs to participate with less than $100 initial investment.

Beyond the efficiencies generated by removing the friction associated with big pharma, a Cardano-based drug discovery network can contribute to many aspects of the global public good. A distributed network would be more transparent, more responsive to the needs of the Global South, and more accessible to humans everywhere who are eager to contribute to public health.

6. Sustainability of the ecosystem
The funds raised by the ecosystem (e.g. crowdfunding, grants, staking payments, NFT revenues) will go to the FlemingDAO and R&D projects on the platform. FlemingDAO redistributes funds in the form of grants to projects, the decisions of which are voted on by the ecosystem members.

7. High-level Roadmap

May 21-Aug 21

• Ongoing discussions with African partners e.g. discuss and identify specific R&D projects in Africa to pilot
• Discuss MVP scope (front and backend, smart contracts) with the development team, commence building. Carry out a security audit of smart contracts
• Seek expressions of interest from the Cardano community e.g. stake pool operators
• Discuss tokenomics mechanisms with key stakeholders in the pharma/medical R&D and crypto communities (e.g. stake pool operators)
• Ongoing identification of key organisations and associated projects that can complement the Africa ecosystem in an open source way e.g. in France, India
• Finalise whitepaper
• Launch landing page

Aug 21-Dec 21

• Finalise and launch MVP
• Finalise and launch pilot projects
• The onboarding process for stake pool operators
• Commence beta testing and data analysis
• Ongoing partnership development
• Marketing

Jan 22-March 22

• Platform and tokenomics iteration based on beta testing findings
• Smart contract security audit
• Marketing
• Token sale
• Platform officially launches

8.How Fundin****g will be used

The majority of the funds will go towards MVP development (front and back end, smart contract development) which is estimated to take 3-4 months. Anything left over will go towards ongoing partnership development.

9. The Team

The founders combine strong experience in healthcare management/consultancy and academic and digital research. The founders have a proven track record in delivering large clinical projects (cancer, radiology/diagnostics, MSK, COVID-19), finance (e.g. analytics modelling and planning), strategy setting (private & public health institutions), and technical capabilities (within science & engineering).

We have a deep understanding and expertise in the issues discussed, and are linked to many key stakeholders within the open-pharma and medical industry, many of which are acting as our advisors, and have committed to having several open-source pharma projects on Fleming Protocol. We've had many conversations with key people within the African drug discovery/development ecosystem and have strong links to key institutions throughout the continent that are pioneering drug/medical R&D innovation.

For the MVP development, we are in discussions to potentially partner with the development lab Quanterall (https://www.quanterall.com/), one of Cardano's key development partners. They have significant experience and expertise in blockchain development and prototyping. We are currently scoping the MVP, which we currently estimate will take 3-4 months.

10.Further information

Please see the link to our draft whitepaper below, which we are actively reviewing. We'd greatly appreciate your feedback:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bs6NhjWxxK2r7RcbXX3zCWyF6CbZm2OT1GodhDovghE/edit?usp=sharing