The notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive fresh from prison after his 2017 fraud conviction announced his latest, eyebrow-raising venture this week: the creation of aBlockchain-based Web3 drug discovery platform that traffics in his own coin,MSI, also known as Martin Shkreli.
According to the press release, the platform is called Druglike. The goals are lofty, but the details are very vague, and Shkreli has already drawn skepticism. It is not clear if the enterprise will run Shkreli afoul of his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry, which stems from the abrupt and callous 4,000 percent price hike of a life-saving drug that made him famous.
The platform aims to make drug discovery more affordable and accessible. Druglike will remove barriers to early-stage drug discovery, increase innovation and allow a broader group of contributors to share the rewards. Those who are focused on rare diseases or in developing markets will be helped by access to these tools.
Virtual screens can sometimes be used in the early stages of drug development. In these cases, pharmaceutical scientists first identify a target that is critical to the development of a disease. Researchers look for compounds or small Molecules that can interfere with the target and keep it from functioning. It can be done in a physical lab with huge libraries of compounds. It can be done using specialized software and a lot of computing power.
There are concepts and questions.
The Druglike is imagined to come in that location. Druglike has a white paper posted on their website that lays out some ideas for how the platform would work. It would use a network of task providers, solvers, and validators to run a virtual drug screening program. There are similarities between the white paper and the online puzzle game FoldIt.
When users complete tasks on Druglike's platform, they are referred to as incorporatingBlockchain concepts and cryptocurrencies. The paper describes a proof-of-optimization concept as a novel verification step for screening work, similar to the proof-of-work method used by the digital currency.
The implementation of Proof-of-Optimization would be based on a distributed ledger. Sommer wrote in the paper that smart contracts allow secure distribution of rewards.
The white paper only describes some of the concepts, and it is not clear how the transactions will be monetized. An online exchange suggested that the company could look for venture capital financing to help fund the project.
Shkreli has been banned from social media but he still has an account on the site. On July 25th, Shkreli announced the company and hosted a discussion about the project.
He denied that the platform would violate his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry. He said that writing code in Github doesn't make you a pharma company.
The story was first published on Ars Technica.
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