Healthcare projects are out-competing other sectors in the race toward decentralized science (DeSci).
Alex Dobrin, awareness steward at VitaDAO — a decentralized collective working to extend human lifespans — told Cointelegraph this is at least in part because the time and cost of bringing new drugs to market is “motivating people to take science and drug discovery into their own hands.”
He said there is “a growing sense” that biomedical research and development “is failing patients.”
Despite improving technology, the time and cost of bringing new drugs to market are “exponentially increasing,” he said.
The medical profession knows this as “Eroom’s Law,” a reversal of the more commonly known Moore’s Law, which states the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years.
Eroom’s Law observes the opposite effect, with the cost of drug discovery doubling every nine years.
Source: Jim Nasr
On Aug. 15, the research organization Onchain Foundation examined 60 decentralized science projects and discovered that 61% were in the healthcare niche.
Impacts of decentralized medicine
Dobrin pointed to real potential benefits from DeSci. He said it will bring “cheaper and faster drugs. Why? Because DeSci is more capital-efficient.”
Asher Looi, co-founder of blockchain and AI diagnostic tool BitDoctor.ai, also believes decentralized medicine has the potential to significantly improve existing systems.
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“By sharing insights into clinical trial performance and using these insights as a collaboration tool, clinical research can become much more efficient while keeping sensitive commercial IP private,” Looi told Cointelegraph.
Looi also sees applications for blockchain within the clinical trial phase, advocating for clinical trial data to be recorded on the blockchain, making it both time-stamped and immutable.
Better trials
Looi outlined three main areas in which decentralized models can have a positive impact: supply chains, trial recruitment and consent.
Looi said healthcare “lends itself to decentralized models because of the criticality of accurate and timely data.”
“We are already seeing a very positive impact on patient experience. Firstly, patients with unmet medical needs can more easily find and be matched with clinical trials through sharing their electronic health records,” Looi said. “Conversely, pharmaceutical companies can access this information to ensure the right patients are included in their clinical trial.”
Looi points out that time is of the essence since “Patient ineligibility and dropout are key causes of delayed clinical trials.”
Dobrin envisages ways in which patients can tap into the highly lucrative pharmaceutical market.
“The next logical evolution is to use decentralized funding to create more structured clinical research and accelerate the path from ‘bench to bedside,’” Dobrin said.
“The genie is out of the bottle now that people realize they can actually own a piece of drugs born from their efforts. And it’s only a matter of time until the next billion-dollar drug emerges onchain.”
In 2023, the total value of the pharmaceutical industry was $1.6 trillion worldwide, up $100 billion from the previous year.
Pharmaceutical market revenue from 2001 to 2023. Source: Statista
A positive from COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic was a disaster not only for healthcare but in so many other ways too.
But there have been some small victories that may ultimately prove beneficial for patients. Looi cited data management as one of these areas. According to Looi, data sharing has improved significantly “both clinical and epidemiological.”
In turn this has led to a questioning of why this model cannot be applied more widely to all disease areas. Looi said:
“I believe we are on the edge of a wave of data collaboration, sparked off by the pandemic, but going way beyond that into all areas of unmet medical need.”
“Pharma companies and society realize that data collaboration does not need to mean sharing secrets of their research, but sharing learnings and intelligence for the benefit of all.”
The integration of DeSci
In the future, the lines between decentralized and centralized medicine may begin to blur, as the healthcare industry adopts whatever model best fits the particular circumstance.
Dobrin says that one day “seamlessly integrated” like the internet today, “no one questions it or has to interact with [the underlying code] HTTP.”
“On the funding side, the traditional scientific industry will use DeSci to de-risk early-stage science in order to get the research to a stage where it is venture investable,” Dobrin said.
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One example of this is VitaDAO, which raised $4.1 million from Pfizer Ventures in January 2023.
“They’d rather throw some capital at a DAO and get access to its pipeline of research than spend big on spinning up an internal research unit in a field of science that is still uncharted territory and largely unproven,” Dobrin said.
“It will be seamlessly integrated — wallet, data and all of these things will be totally abstracted, it’s like the internet today — no one questions it or has to interact with HTTP.”