3. Desci: how we can use smart contracts to fund open source medicine. Feat. Savva Kerdemelidis.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Savva Kerdemelidis: Pharma should be interested in finding new ways to develop clinical trial data, and ultimately help patients.

There is this idea in pharma called Eroom's Law, which is that, that essentially pharma productivity is decreasing over time. Essentially it's becoming more and more expensive to make new drugs. It's like mining for gold in this mine that's getting harder and harder to get gold out of. And we've got all these other mines and areas where we could mine for gold. But because we've focused on the patents and patentable drugs, we're very limited.

[00:00:54] Mizter Rad: All right. I'm guessing some more people will come a bit. In any case, I'll start now cuz we always try to start on time. And, it's great to have Savva today.

I'm probably gonna pronounce your last name wrongly. Savva Kerdemelidis. How was that? Did I pronounce it well?

[00:01:14] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah. Fantastic. Awesome. Thanks.

[00:01:16] Mizter Rad: Savva is the CEO of Crowdfunded Cures. He's also a patent and crypto attorney. An advisor of several DAOs here in Germany and also elsewhere, I believe. And I wanted to bring him on because I think this is a topic, or the topic we're gonna touch, is a topic that concerns, should concern to every one of us. It's related to health. It's related to curing and treating diseases for the betterment of humanity. And every one of us, of course is or should be, or will be affected in one way or the other by the way Savva a and colleagues like him are trying to solve several issues.

So to begin with, I wanted to you know, mention a bit or tell our audience a little bit about Crowdfunded Cures. Crowdfunded Cures is on a mission to incentivize repurposing of off-patent drugs to create new, normally low cost therapeutics using financially innovative pay for success contracts. So it might sound a bit complex for those people that are not, used to the web three blockchain lingo or people that are not an attorney or have no idea about legal, um, language.

So I would love to hear from Savva a little bit more about that mission. That sounds super ambitious. Super challenging, but also full of hope and good news, I believe. So maybe Savva you can tell us a bit more about it.

[00:02:47] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah, no thanks. Um, so the, the idea sort of came from my master's thesis. Was a while ago.

I published in 2014 Crowdfunded Cures actually was a charity in 2013 in New Zealand. So it's a little bit kind of pre crypto. However, since Covid, I've really got very energized around this particular issue and sort of picking it up. And also have been since then, I was doing a lot of consulting and particularly for a few crypto projects and decided to really go into this almost like full time.

Last few years or so. Last couple of years or since Covid really hit and and there's some, uh, yeah, there's kind of a few things coming together. But one of the things that really, um, kind of told me, well, I've gotta kind of really run with this, is this, is this stuff around repurposing off patent drugs, which was quite a big thing during Covid actually.

And, and, uh, quite controversial. You know, there was Trump and he was started to talk about this drug called hydroxychloroquine that this French researcher started talking about and saying, this is a treatment for Covid. And then people were throwing around numbers like, oh, it's a hundred percent cure for Covid, et cetera.

Turned out that wasn't the case. Uh, you know, in larger clinical trials. However, since then, because of this political issue, apparently around 6 billion $ has been spent on molecules like hydroxychloroquine through public funding. However, you do have people still arguing about it. Maybe not hydroxychloroquine, but things like Ivermectin which is another kind of off patent drug and now has this political thing where, you know, you've got right wing people thinking that, Ivermectin is the cure for covid and things. And it kind of just sort of shown me that there's this real market failure around, um, Uh, you know, it's, it's sort of showcased this market failure. Usually, it's not really in the, in the public eye, but it's actually happens all the time.

So there is this massive, massive gap in incentives for medicines. And what happens is that, when you have a new medicine or when you have a, an ingredient of a medicine, and it's not possible to enforce a monopoly price over it. For instance, the medicine itself, when they're very new only one person can make it because they're patented.

But as soon as this medicine goes off patent. Then multiple people make it.

They make it in China, they make it India. Um, you know they, there could be six manufacturers or something, and the price plummets to almost like the marginal cost. The new drug might be like $5,000 for a course or 10,000 or 50,000 or even more.

But as soon as it goes generic, it tends to go to kind of really, really cheap, like sometimes cents or, or dollars, even particularly for, for a drug that's very popular. That sort of makes it like a chemical, like an industrial chemical, like how you buy salt in the supermarket or you can buy aspirin in the pharmacy and what that means that there's no longer any private incentives to look at that drug and try and figure out new uses for it. So most drugs have more than one use, but sort of studies have shown that as soon as a drug goes off patent, the chance of it being repurposed for a new use sort of approaches zero.

So there is this massive gap and that doesn't just extend to drugs. It can extend to things like supplements. So we also spend around 6 billion a year in supplements. But we don't actually have a lot of evidence that these supplements actually do anything medical. Because no one will fund large clinical trials.

Very large clinical trials needed to get FDA approval or just to prove and convince the medical establishment that they work because these clinical trials could cost sort of 50 million or a hundred million or more. So there is this big market failure.

We're kind of wasting all this money on, on, on supplements that we don't know whether they actually work or not.

Things like plant medicines, psychedelics, and, uh, and diets, which I'm quite interested in as well. So, diets, there's a lot of evidence that diet can be used to treat disease. Particularly ketogenic diet would be shown to be effective for reversing type two diabetes. But again, not a lot of money in diets.

When you look at the clinical trials. They're not these randomized controlled trials that we, that I can talk later. But there, there's a kind of very high level of evidence, but very expensive. Around $10,000 per person, but yeah to, to show that something is effective. So just to, yeah, just to kind of, I, I guess I can talk about randomized control trials and things, but just really briefly. This is kind of the evidence. And what we wanna try and incentivize with Crowdfunded Cures is to generate this data. And a randomized controlled trial is basically the one of the highest levels of evidence we have for determining if a particular treatment is effective or not. Unfortunately, they're quite expensive, but what you do is you have say patients, you might have a hundred patients or a thousand patients, and you split them into, one of them gets the treatment and the other one gets the placebo. And both of them ideally, they're double blinded. So both of them don't know, um, whether they're getting the real treatment or not. And then it's randomized and even the doctors don't know what they're prescribing. Now with the diet, it's quite hard and you can compare it to placebo. You can compare like a sham diet.

Psychedelics also quite difficult because most people know if they're on psychedelics or not. However you can design controls and what it does really importantly is that sort of takes away the placebo effect, which is like where people believe that something's gonna work. So something like homeopathy which is quite popular in Germany, apparently and they, they do refund it. It is, I mean, the scientific basis for something like that is very limited, and the effect is probably mostly placebo, which is very powerful. And I think, you know, I don't think there's been any randomized control trials for homeopathy because it's sort of, it's basically based on, it's basically like that water or something like that, something is by diluted to like a millionth or a billionth or a trillionth or something like that, some effect.

But the mind is very powerful and there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's good. You know, you can have placebo effects, but the, if it's used in medicine then these randomized control trials show that it's not placebo. And that's the way to show efficacy. And then if you can do these large clinical trials, they're called phase three clinical trials, typically over a thousand people. And you can show that it's not, that's effective and it's not a placebo effect. You can get what's called regulatory approval. So that means you can start marketing the treatment. Unfortunately, under the current system, the only way you can get, that the money to do these big clinical trials is sort of 50 million or so, or a hundred million sometimes or whatever, is where you can enforce a monopoly price with the patents.

So, uh, the government doesn't pay, doesn't wanna risk paying for these big 50 million, a hundred million dollar clinical trials. If there's a risk that they could fail. Cause it would be a big political issue. Also, one government's like, why should I pay? There's no kind of pooled universal government that does it.

So they rely on the private pharmaceutical industry to do these trials. And then as a result, we could have thousands and thousands of treatments out there that could be good treatments or even cures, but they just happen to be off patent. So there's this big gap and what we are particularly interested in is kind of filling in that gap with another incentive that doesn't rely on patents that we call a pay for success contract.

And there's other names for it. You call 'em social impact bonds. You could call 'em prizes where they're basically like a prize. You could call 'em advanced market commitments. It's basically, it's a commitment from somebody to pay for the data if it's successful. And that creates a market for then generating that data.

And that's what we're trying to do. And there's a reason why crypto is involved, uh, particularly at an early stage. Or crypto, allows people to basically pull money from all around the world very quickly. It gives you access to liquidity. There's things called IP NFTs, which basically let you invest as an investor to, to basically invest in like something that isn't normally profitable, but you can get an outcome payment from something called an impact market or the price fund.

Yeah, I'd be happy to go into these details, but essentially that's what we're trying to do is, and that's what crypto is kind of, a lot of people in crypto are interested in that. So sorry for the big conversation, but yeah.

[00:11:29] Mizter Rad: No, absolutely. I I think it's, it's amazing to hear to hear you talk. And you definitely have good knowledge on the topic.

You've been doing this since 2013 before crypto and I, I believe crypto well is is a tool, right? It's a tool to, to facilitate the process. Maybe in this case of financing those innovative off patent drugs to create new therapies and stuff like that. But maybe you can tell me or tell us a bit more about, what exactly, is IP nft, so how does that work?

How do you raise money through an IP NFT for example?.

[00:12:06] Savva Kerdemelidis: Sure. And that's, that's kind of the, the, the company or the, the project, the DAO that, that sort of first pioneered there is actually a German company. They're called Molecule. And then founded, co-founded by Paul Kohlhaas and Tyler Golato. They do have a kind of Swiss connection as well, but the, their, their main offices are in Berlin.

The IP NFT is basically a, a mechanism to facilitate investment, particularly at an early stage. And, and particularly, although there's no reason why it should be limited to this area, but in biopharma. And what it does essentially in I an NFT is something called a non fungible token. Essentially it's a unique kind of, it's like the opposite of, of something like, um, Uh, Bitcoin or Ethereum or Doge coin or whatever, where it's, where money, essentially one token, or it's like one Euro is the same as as another Euro.

If something is, and you can swap it out. If I give you one euro and then I say, well, give me that Euro, I'll give you another Euro, you don't care. So that they're all the same, whereas a non fungible token that's called fungibility, non fungible token, means that basically things are unique. And, and what that allows is basically with a non fungible token, you could sort of assign this NFT to two things in the real world. And you can basically say, okay, this is a unique uh, uh, computer. This is a unique lab. This is a unique, um, uh, and then you can say this is a unique bit of data essentially. And then what they're doing with these IP NFTs, essentially they're linking the IP NFTs to clinical trial data that comes from a particular lab.

And so if you say, want to raise money for a particular project, you can issue an IP NFT that relates to that project and says you could have a real world contract that basically links to the IP NFT. And you can say that, hey, if this if something comes out of this lab, if there's a patent or some other IP or things like, you know, if it's useful data then that belongs to me and that's linked to this IP NFT.

And then what that allows you to do then raise money on that IP NFT. Potentially can fractionalize ownership of it. And you can trade these IP NFTs on the crypto markets in the same way that people kind of trade normal NFTs like, you know, Bored Ape Yacht Club or whatever. So it allows people then all of a sudden to have access to the liquidity of the crypto markets and the kind of dynamic, sort of processes where the markets are, are investing in things, and then people kind of, you know, particular IP NFTs go up because the project does well and it kind of lets you avoid having to sort of spin out companies and things like that you can do.

Instead of people investing in companies and shares, they can invest in specific projects. And it gets very granular. You know, they could invest in one particular treatment protocol, or a patent. And they could then fractionize ownership of that patent. And it kind of, the idea actually eventually is that it does allow kind of more community owned IP.

And, and one of the examples that they, that they say is like, what if like the insulin patent was owned by, by the patients. And then how would that affect the pricing of insulin. And, the patients wouldn't necessarily want to be price gouged. But I'm particularly interested in, in the IP NFT framework because I think it allows, it allows then investment in things through their, through our kind of, idea with Crowdfunding Cures where you have a impact market, where you basically have people crowdfunding like a prize. Or the government basically agreeing to pay for successful clinical trial data, then you have a means for people to invest in something that wasn't previously investible, like a diet or a supplement or an off patent drug. And you can issue this IP NFT say an open source IP NFT, which is a bit of an oxymoron. But seems contradictory. But you, you could have a future where people that are VCs and, and normal investors, and impact investors can invest in things like diets and open source treatments. And then get a return on investment through, um, ownership of this IP NFT.

[00:16:17] Mizter Rad: Okay. That, that's, that's clear. How, what, what has been in your, in your experience, what has been the reaction of, the traditional pharma companies when they hear that there is a new way sort of raising money to fund clinical trials and therefore launch new therapies, uh, or new... yeah, medicines.

How has their reaction been to this? Do you know? Have you had, have you had any experience with them?

[00:16:44] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's doing quite well. I mean, Molecule itself, it has raised around 12, 13 million just recently. So yeah, I mean, Pharma, they, they're obviously as technology, as you say, it's a tool. And, uh, you know, there're skeptics. I'm sure that they did actually Vita Dao is another project, sort of, well, it's a Dao, so it's more distributed, but also came outta Molecule. And they're focused on longevity and they've now invested in multiple projects.

I believe they deployed sort of two to 3 million in capital. They usually invest around $250,000 at a time. It could be sort of up to a million dollars. And they raised around 10 million last, last year and last July. And sort of, and, and they've attracted a bunch of scientists and people that are in the community and it's a bunch of, uh, people coming together, essentially acting like a VC.

And they've also just recently had Pfizer, and proposed a token, purchase of around 500,000, which is not sort of a controlling stake or anything like that, but it's gonna kind of split the community a bit because crypto being sort of inherently, kind of anti-establishment, you know. The idea is that they don't want the establishment to um, you know, they want to create these disruptive models. And you know, the same with Molecule.

I think they've got some traditional VCs and investors in there. So yeah, and recently actually Vita DAO and Molecule, they have that right up in the paper and nature. So there's, there is mainstream attention. People are interested. There's obviously skeptics around crypto. But I think Desci or decentralized science is this kind of area that we're in now, and there's a lot of people scientists recognize that science has problems and a lot of the problems around science is funding. When you're a scientist and you're a young person, you're brilliant. You might be waiting till you're 45 before you get your first kind of NIH grant or big grant. And then, until you get tenure and things like that your job security is really low. You're usually very underpaid. And then you look at your extremely smart engineering colleagues who are like, might raise millions of dollars for their startup, for some silly idea, like a, you know, some sort of yeah, just some ridiculous idea

But no offense to the engineers, but you know it's very difficult to raise money as a scientist. And so it's very frustrating. And then the other option is to go to the kind of dark side, as it were, to work for a big pharma, which can be very, demoralizing as well because their business model is reliant on funding new patented drugs, which are You know, might not be the best treatment for people.

And then, and they're kind of selling this single molecule to as many people as possible. So something like Humira, which is a very good drug, but it's, you know, they, they sell it, 10,000, 10, sorry, $10 billion a year. And they just have one company around this one drug. Which has something like 150 patents around it, and you're just, you know, you're, you're, you're, you know, as a scientist, I mean, you can only really look at so many things for TNF alpha.

And I think, you know, probably get quite more sorry, reducing TNF alpha with, this, this drug, which is, Humira at a dilemma, ma. But it gets demoralizing, as a scientist. So I think there's a lot of. And, and also there is this process, this idea in pharma called Eroom's Law, which is the opposite of Moore's Law. Which is this idea that, processing powers sort of exponentially increasing every few years.

And Eroom's Law, which is the opposite, which is professor Jack Scannell idea is that, that essentially pharma productivity is decreasing over time, and essentially it's becoming more and more expensive to make new drugs. So it used to sort of cost, you know, less than a billion dollars. Now that's over a billion dollars.

And people say it might cost 4 billion to make a new drug. And I think it's basically because of this, market failure and because essentially we're, it's like mining for gold in this mine that's being, that's getting harder and harder to get gold out of. And we've got all these other mines and all this other sort of areas where we could mine for gold.

But we can only really, because we've focused on the patents and patentable drugs, we're very limited. Of course there, there are now new areas, like mRNA has become a big thing. Mm-hmm. um, biologics also become a big thing.

So Eroom's Law is kind of flattening out a bit and it's still around a billion dollars a year to make a new drug.

But, you know, there, there is this productivity crisis in pharma. And so I think, yeah to kind of go back to the original point is. I think pharma and scientists are all very interested in, and also addressing these market failures. Even though no doubt, if you could come up with an off patent drug that treated cancer very effectively than other drugs, than other patented drugs, you would cause a lot of damage and harm to business models.

You know, if you had a very expensive drug that was worse than an off patent drug. And that was proven to work, off patent drug was proven to work something like rapamycin, to treat aging or, or, you know, generic ketamine to treat depression or a diet like a ketogenic diet to treat cancer.

You know, that would be quite disruptive. So there's definitely pushback. But I think ultimately pharma kind of also is interested in and should be interested in finding new ways to essentially develop clinical trial data. Which is the important thing, and to fund clinical trials and ultimately help patients.

[00:22:08] Mizter Rad: It, it seems to me that, of course, the pharma industry is used to certain ways of making money or certain business models. But, these new methodologies of raising money or getting clinical data, with the funding of, let's say regular people, will definitely disrupt the way they've been doing business for years and years.

So, there's definitely gonna be a pushback. I applaud your work and everyone else that is in this Desci movement that is trying to change such a big , that affects everyone of us. So to my point, how do you see, you know, the next five, 10 years, when you look at this situation?.

When you look at the current ways, the pharma industry behaves or does business. And the more grassroots movements of crypto people or crypto lawyers like yourself, patent lawyers like yourself, and entrepreneurs in general trying to raise funds in alternative ways through IP NFTs or the source likes like that.

How do you see that evolving in the next 5, 10, 15 years? What's your hope? At least.

[00:23:21] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah. Well, I, I think for crypto specifically, there's, there's a lot of interesting movements around funding public goods. So there's, there's this thing called the refi movement or green pill.

A lot of projects like, GitCoin, which is basically like crowd funding, but they call it quadratic funding. Essentially what happens is that if, and we've got some Gitcoin grants as well if you wanna check out our Twitter page, for Crowdfunded Cures. But you can see like if you donate $1, then you get maybe $65 matching.

But if you donate much more, then maybe, you know, you'd only get sort of another sort of a hundred dollars, you might get $150 matching or something like that. And the idea of that is the kind of quadratic funding as a way to kind of democratize funding and sort of fund the projects that really the community wanna fund instead of like special interest groups and things like that.

So there's, there's ideas. You have people with lots of money. There's ideas that, you know, we can democratize things like funding public goods and we can also do that through voting as well. Democratize the voting process by giving, you know, people that have more share holdings, they maybe have less of a say versus lots of people having smaller votes.

And there's other ideas by this, another platform called Optimism, and it's also backed by Vitalik Buterin, who's the co-founder of Ethereum, around the idea of retroactive public goods funding. Which is basically similar to what we're talking about with these impact markets and prizes.

Essentially, it says that if you produce a public good, if you do something, you know that, that benefits the public. You make some open source software or you fund a clinical trial for, for a treatment for an off paid drug or nutraceutical or diet that works. Then you'll get funding retroactively.

So you'll get funding from people that basically reward people that publish public goods and, and um, you know, there's a lot of money also in the crypto markets, you know, as we can see, like. Things can, you know, you can raise hundreds of millions of dollars overnight and people have these projects that were, were worth nothing and then worth a billion dollars in market cap.

So, you know, there is funding available. And I think if the community are also quite aligned, and there's a lot of interesting areas, particularly in psychedelics. A lot of overlaps, a lot of people in the crypto space, we into psychedelics and psychedelics are very useful disruptive treatments, for mental health.

Mental health is a big problem. Psychedelics, most of the psychedelics are cheap and off patent, so something like ketamine can be used to treat depression very effectively, but it's off patent, so it's very hard to raise money for clinical trials for that unless you can patent it.

[00:26:11] Mizter Rad: Lemme jump in there because I think this is super interesting and let me just, yeah, break down a little bit more this topic of psychedelics that are off patent and therefore are really hard to fund. So what that means is that, you know, generally, traditionally, patented drugs, they have a better roi -return on investment.

Is that correct? Because they have some sort of security throughout 10 years or so. I don't know how many years patents normally last for. But that's a secure investment in a way for: governments or pharma industry, pharma companies or so. But, but off-patent drugs don't have that security. So that, that's what you mean that it's, it's hard to to find funding for them.

Is that correct?

[00:26:58] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah. Yeah. Well, basically that, that's the point, is that patented drugs you'll only get funding as a VC, like, you know, as an investor in a biotech company, you're only gonna be able to invest in a project if the drug is patented. Because patented drug allows you, if clinical trials are successful, clinical trials maybe cost 50 million, a hundred million, 200 million or more. And you've gotta make your money back.

And what a patent does is lets you charge a monopoly price for that drug. And you can make your money back. But also, in psychedelics, and things like that, you know, you've got off patent drugs which are freely available, like generic ketamine or Psilocybin or you know, even things like cannabis and stuff like that where you basically can't, enforce a monopoly price.

I mean, there's obviously legal issues around a lot of these drugs as well, but assuming that these things eventually become legal, you can't sort of enforce a very high price for, you know, cannabis. Even if it treats chronic pain or with magic mushrooms, you know, truffles, you can get 'em for like $20 or whatever in Amsterdam.

[00:28:01] Mizter Rad: Yeah.

[00:28:02] Savva Kerdemelidis: And.

[00:28:02] Mizter Rad: or you can easily grow them yourselves. I mean... very low barrier of entry.

[00:28:06] Savva Kerdemelidis: Definitely. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, we, we were talking with a project that does medicinal mushrooms and medicinal mushrooms could treat a bunch of diseases. You get mushrooms that can, that can basically produce drugs just like a little pharma company in your backyard. You could make them yourself or you could, you know, have a supplier that grows them for very cheap. And because these things, as you say are not, you know, there's no way of protecting that with the patents. There's this gap. And our idea is instead of relying on a patent, we basically have these like, almost like a prize that we negotiate where people, you know, and I think it's more the government and or health insurers that will benefit.

They'll say: if you can repurpose this off patent drug, then we will purchase your version, or we'll give you the money because you did the clinical trials. And or will purchase your branded version of the drug. Then we'll pay you basically a higher price so that you.

You can make your money back for doing the clinical trials. And then that allows you then to invest in that. And, you know, psychedelics is a big area where it's, it's difficult to raise money. You can, you can set up clinics. We've got someone here actually from New Zealand as well, I think: Tom.

Hi Tom, and maybe he can speak about it. I don't know how late it is in New Zealand though.

[00:29:27] Mizter Rad: I can, I can, I can give him a word if he is there.

[00:29:29] Savva Kerdemelidis: He's also involved in basically psychedelics treatment when a, a researcher in New Zealand.

[00:29:35] Mizter Rad: Yeah, I invited Tom to speak.

Let's see if he accepts the invitation. But, before I forget, and talking about clinical trials, do you think it's a problem that clinical trials are so expensive on the one hand and take so long to produce results?

I'm just saying that because on the one hand we are talking about opening up the investment opportunity on this kind of, let's call them assets, to regular people that maybe don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to invest. And at the same time are used to investing in assets that maybe give a return on investment much faster than what maybe a clinical trial takes to be completed.

So I guess my question is, is that a problem? That clinical trials on the one hand take too long? And second, that you know, people are used to investing in something fast. That produces fast returns.

[00:30:31] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah, well, definitely there's two problems there and, and I think crypto can help, and I think this open source model can also help both of these things.

So yes, you're right, like, typically, so for a, a biotech investor, they're looking at sort of a 10, 10 year kind of, well, there's usually the exit is when a big pharma company comes and buys out the company, the biotech company. That's kind of when they get their exit. That might happen in sort of three to five years or something.

But to get the drug to market, from kind of idea to market might take 10 to 15 years, and you asked before kind of how long patents last. Typically they last sort of 20, 25 years. You can get them a five year extension, so 25 years, might take 10 to 15 years to get to the market through these phase one, two, and three clinical trials.

And then you've only got like 10 years basically to sell these drugs as much as you can at monopoly price. And sort of find new uses for these drugs, et cetera, to maximize sales. But for that 10 to 15 years, or 10 to 12 years usually. And, and so there is this kind of long sales cycle. Is very risky, like biotech stocks of, you know, traditionally very not a very good investment. Very volatile at the moment, not doing very well, even although Pfizer's doing great with covid and, and I think Moderna is doing great, but in general, biotech hasn't been doing that great.

So yeah, super risky. Very specialized. And, and the time to exit takes a long time. And also as, as I was saying, that the clinical trials is sort of hundreds of millions of dollars. They can be because you've, you're testing new molecules and they haven't been tested in humans. They could be dangerous and there's a massive failure rate.

You know, say like one in 10,000 molecules might get through, you know, from a hit to clinical trials. But then the thing with off patent drugs and supplements and diets and things like that, is that you've actually kind of, one of the biggest issues is around safety. And for those kind of drugs, you've already established safety because they've already been used, multiple times.

And, and for many years, and patients, you know, sometimes 50 years or more. So we've already de-risked, that to some extent. And all we're really worried about is if they're effective. So because safety's been dealt with, the price really comes down. You can go to phase three clinical trials straight away.

So that makes. And also those phase three clinical trials might only take a few years. So, you know, if you can basically empower these open source business models through pay for success. Or impact markets. Or, or prizes, then you can basically get much quicker return on investment. You know, you could choose a drug or an off patent drug or a diet supplement and prove that it works in a clinical trial very quickly. And for some particular diseases like Covid, you know, you might be able to do a trial in six months. And then get a big exit. So I think it kind of de-risks it, and lowers the costs, because the safety issues.

But then there is also the other thing about clinical trials being quite expensive generally, because they have to be randomized controlled trials. And there are other projects particularly in the crypto space as well, but also sort of in the web two space that are looking at decentralizing clinical trials and, and basically having, say people do clinical trials remotely and wearing wearables and things like that, and ways of bringing down the costs on the supply side.

[00:33:46] Mizter Rad: That's super interesting. So decentralizing clinical trials, and that would, in your opinion, reduce the cost of those clinical trials and change the way it's done basically.

[00:33:56] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah, I mean the efforts around there. But we we're, we're not really focused as Crowdfunding Cures. We're laser focused. I think we will basically empower the ecosystem, but what we're really interested in is creating demand on the demand side for these, open source medicines, off-patent medicines where there's this market failure. What we call unmonopolizable therapies.

So things like psychedelics, off-patent psychedelics, plant medicines, diet supplements, off-patent drugs, lifestyle interventions, you know, things like meditation or sauna or doing a gratitude journal, things like, or talking therapy. There's not a lot of money put into talking therapy, uh, versus like, uh, pharmaceutical drugs.

So there could be some really, and it could be some massive benefit to society if we prove that these drugs work. And also more importantly, there is a business model because it, it would save money for the government and health insurers if they could come up with a very low cost treatment.

So there's, it's not just a charity. There's actually a business model around it. But the tricky part is, you know, convincing the governments to basically pay us like a hundred million dollars for proving that an off-patent drug works. Versus them where they're happy to pay billions and billions of dollars for a patented drug which is less effective.

So there's this kind of nonsensical way of funding research at the moment where, you know, if you can basically patent something and wrap a patent around it, you get a, like a 10 billion prize or more. But if you, you know, if you prove that an off patent drug is, is works and is more, even more effective than the patented one, you get nothing.

You have to rely on, on grant funding. And you might be lucky if you get 5 million if you're lucky to do a small clinical trial. It's published in an obscure journal, and nobody cares about it. Nobody reads it. And the doctors, you know, your doctor particularly doesn't. There's not gonna be reading these small journals unless you come to them and, and say: Hey, you know, I want to try this new treatment, and you're taking all the risk yourself and you're an N of one.

So yeah, there's this massive, market failure and, and big opportunity I think. But , as I saying, on the demand side, that's where we're, we're really interested on. And basically engaging with governments, health insurers, and ultimately the public through say, crowdfunding, to generate demand for these off-patent open source medicines.

[00:36:14] Mizter Rad: So would you say that the main challenge at the moment is get the attention of the government and bigger investors or retail investors... smaller investors?

[00:36:24] Savva Kerdemelidis: From my perspective, I don't, I'm not super concerned with investors cuz investors have a very simple formula, which is, um, you know, if I give you money, then I make sort of five or 10% back return on investment.

So, you know, if we create a demand, if we create a market, then the investors will come. And, I mean, we are talking to investors and things and, and it is possible, you know, there are things called people: impact investors, which are very interested in investing in these kind of projects that they end up doing a social or public good.

We're very focused on sort of governments, health insurers and ultimately the public. I think hopefully through crowdfunding like so we're trying to do the sale of like, say for instance, wanna do an NFT drop for open source psychedelic medicine to treat depression, and we will sell these NFTs and we've got this artist: Michael be Price, who is super cool. He used to be involved in Dungeon and Dragons back in the day as a physicist. He's used, Dali generative art , and mid journey to create these amazing NFTs, obviously that's just a donation, but that, that's the kind of, that's what we're trying to do is generate kind of a market.

So people buy these NFTs, which represents basically successful clinical trial data for a psychedelic to prove that, a psychedelic is safe and effective, treatment. And that could be ketamine, you know, Psilocybin, there's people doing a lot of work in, in this space. And, you know, basically selling that as a product, like a kind of Kickstarter, to kind of get the ball rolling.

But yes, ultimately, and we are engaging with, you know NHS. Have a talk with CMS tomorrow to try and get governments to move health insurers. We're trying to reach out to health insurers as well. On the basis that they'll save more money, you know, by agreeing to one of these advanced market commitments or pay for success contracts for an off patent, treatment they will, you know, if they pay a hundred million, then they'll save 200 million or 500 million. So it should make sense for them logically. And we are sort of, um, funding, we're raising money for a feasibility study to also prove that. But, you know, these folks are gonna be slow to move and, and possibly we're hoping that we can engage with the crypto folks to raise maybe a smaller amount. Maybe $10 million to do a prize fund in the sort of psychedelic medicine space to kind of prove this out as a pilot. Or get some high net worth crypto whale to come in and that's interested in a particular disease. Maybe they're suffering from mental health issues themselves and they just wanna know which treatment will work, and they don't care if it's not patent or not.

So, yeah. That's the kind of tricky part is getting the commitments, getting that, uh, presales, I guess of clinical trial data.

[00:39:05] Mizter Rad: Let's say you wanna raise 10 million for the Psilocybin treatment of depression, and you put that in a crowd funding platform, crypto crowd funding platform.

You sell NFTs, whatever. So now let's say you raise that money. How does the person holding the NFT benefit besides the impact, social impact benefit for society they're having? Is there a way that that person can get their money back? Are the treatments generating any... any cash flow?

Or how do you imagine this?.

[00:39:38] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah, it's sort of, I, I, I mean from my perspective, I think it's quite simple conceptually, but obviously when you start talking about smart contracts and IP NFTs and medical impact NFTs and things that get a bit confusing. But the best way to think of it is like a kind of prize.

So we're basically crowdfunding a prize and say it's 10 million. And say that prize fund is then paid out, not all to one person, but they're paid out sort of every year, 20% gets paid out to clinical trials. That show that, uh, of a minimum size that show that say a psychedelic like Psilocybin or ketamine will help reduce depression scores, which are like a standardized score.

So say the Hamilton Scale of depression. And they're paid out to those, uh, Clinical trials that show that you can improve you, you say the percentage improvement versus usual care, which is the current standard of care. Then you've got a means to basically determine how much to pay and how much gets paid up.

And there's a market. And then you have, now, now there's a market basically. Now you have, now you have buyers essentially. So now because there's a market, there was no market before for off-patent therapies, for off-patent Psilocybin, clinical trial data. Now you have investors basically coming in and investing in clinical trials, funding clinical trials to satisfy that market.

And and yeah, that's kind of, so there's, there's two sides. There's demand, there's the payers, the people that basically create the market because they pre, they pre-commit funds to say, we will pay for successful clinical trials. And this is the mechanism that determines what success means. And, and this is how we determine how much we pay, which is we pay according to how well your treatment does.

And then, and then on the other side, now you have a market, you have investors investing in, in, in certain things to satisfy that market, and you can facilitate that through IP NFTs. Instead of patents, they just buy an IP NFT that represents a treatment protocol for an off patent drug. And then that IP NFT could then achieve a return on that investment in the future that makes sense.

[00:41:49] Mizter Rad: That, that makes total sense. So talking about IP NFTs versus traditional patents.

What's sort of the main advantage of doing it through an IP NFT.

I believe, maybe paperwork and all this bureaucracy that needs to be done through traditional patents is eliminated by using NFTs on the blockchain or how do you see this?.

[00:42:11] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah, I mean, it is obviously easy, like you can mint an IP NFT very quickly, but you still need to have a contract, a real contract. With say a particular lab or a particular entity that will fund, that will conduct the clinical trials or propose the protocol. So, there are some advantages, but you know, this could be done off-chain.

Definitely. There's no reason why that, that necessarily, we could have a prize fund that's just the prize, and it could be, uh, you know, and we have criteria, but, doing it on chain is, you know, you can have smart contracts and trade things in real time. You can trade things on markets in real time on crypto.

You can trade an NFT on a crypto market in real time. And which basically gives you liquidity. And, and it sort of, it also gives you the signals from the market. So there's a lot of efficiency reasons why it becomes easier.

As far as patents replacing, yeah, IP NFTs replacing patents: it's a little bit of a, like, I mean, traditionally you could have an IP NFT and that represents clinical trial data that could then be patented. So maybe they come up with a, a new reformulation for an off-patent drug or a new drug itself, entirely new drug. And that could, that, that could achieve a return because a patent basically can be used to charge monopoly priced under the traditional pharma model.

But then maybe there's some data there as well that's off-patent. And then it would achieve success under clinical trials. And that might be eligible to receive an outcome payment under this paper success model, under this prize model. So that's another way of making money from owning an IP NFT. It's basically more of an open source way, but it's another way that, you know, as an investor you could get additional funds. Or you could invest, you know, completely in patents or you could invest under this Pay for Success model. But the latter one is very new, and that's kind of the bit that we're excited about.

But to do that, again, as I was saying, we've gotta create demand. People have to basically buy into this idea of, of pre-ordering successful clinical trial data. Now I think it's quite a compelling product per se, if we're gonna think of it as a product. Or at least if you were to donate, say, to a traditional charity.

Traditionally people like donate to charities, right? And they donate billions of dollars or whatever, but then they don't know what the, the money, what happens with that money. Um, they dunno if it gets, if it funds clinical trials that work, the charity takes on all the risk. But with this model, you don't take on any risk.

You only pay for successful clinical trial data. And a bit controversially about a lot of charities. Over 50% of their funding comes from big pharma. Not to kind of wade into this area, but their role is to act as like a marketing agency for big pharma and sort of have all these patients that are saying: Hey, we want these new treatments.

And the government is like, well, the health insurance is like, well, these treatments are extremely expensive. Right? You, you're paying like 500,000, sorry, you know, or 50,000, a hundred thousand dollars for this cancer drug that that only extends your life by like a few months, and it's just not cost effective.

According to the government, there's this thing called QALY, a quality adjusted life year. And the government tends to not want pay more than sort of 50,000 US dollars per QALY. And some of these drugs, the QALY might be 150,000 per QALY or or more. And, um, You know, it sounds harsh, but like, if they pay $150,000 for a QALY for a cancer drug, that means a bunch of people that could have been saved by, you know, surgery or some other intervention, um, don't get surgery.

You know, so the government has limited money and they have to figure out how, how they can maximize qualities, but with their budget. And so, you know, you've got these kind of societies or whatever of a big society's getting a bunch of money. But they, they essentially just do these sort of campaigns. They write into the paper and they say: Hey, you know, there's these new drugs but the government doesn't wanna pay for, for the drug.

And so it's a bit of a game. And, and look, I'm not blaming any side the charities or the pharma companies, they're, they're kind of playing their only, you know, they're playing the rules of the game because all games say that that's the only way they can make money.

[00:46:26] Mizter Rad: It has been done like that traditionally over the past decade. So, I mean, why not continuing if it's paying off anywhere for them? So, yeah. Yeah. Definitely not, not a game of blaming here and there, but rather trying to find alternative ways of doing, doing, of doing business and, and, and having a broader impact in a good way to as many people as possible.

So that's fantastic. Savva, it was beautiful to have you here. I really appreciate you jumping on a call with us. I will be having a super interesting guest in the next two weeks. I'll invite you to join if you want. And thank you so much for the work you're doing. I really, again appreciate the work you do not, because, you know, I'm not, I'm not in the scene.

I'm not, I'm not a scientist. I'm not an attorney. I'm not a doctor myself, but I really appreciate people like you that spend energy and time of their lives trying to better some part of society. And I think this part that you're taking on your shoulders is super, super important. I don't know if you wanna share any more last words.

[00:47:32] Savva Kerdemelidis: Yeah, no, thanks so much. I appreciate having, I mean, we're sort of in full evangelist modes, so I'm happy to talk to whatever, whoever folks, and connect with people and yeah, if people are interested in this, definitely come and like check out our Discord. You can come onto our website, crowdfundedcures.org and then there's a discord around the, on the bottom right.

And you can come on there and meet some folks there in the community. And we're just trying to push it as hard as we can kind of at multiple angles. We've got quite a few volunteers now, sort of about five in the core. And it's about sort of another five or so advisors.

We're all volunteering at the moment. But we're hoping to be able to do a token sort of a launch, as an impact DAO, medical impact DAO, sometime this year or next year.

[00:48:17] Mizter Rad: People should follow Savva to understand how his path is moving and definitely support his projects cuz I really believe in it and yeah.

Thank you so much everyone for being here, for listening to this later on as well. Have a beautiful Wednesday, rest of the week and talk to you guys soon. Chao Chao.

Chao Savva. Thank you so much.

[00:48:40] Savva Kerdemelidis: Chao chao. Hasta luego.