Paul Kohlhaas, CEO and co-founder of Molecule, speaks at Zuzalu.
When you go to the doctor today, you don’t always think of the word ‘care’. Visits are often rushed, with endless phone calls and difficulty accessing information online, an already depersonalized process. Transferring information between healthcare providers is a mammoth task, one that is only truly matched by the effort required to get the necessary referrals from one doctor to another.
To Molecule’s Paul Kohlhaas and Vincent Weisser, these are all just symptoms of a broader problem: the extent to which profit is an exaggerated — if not the — decisive factor in medicine. With a lofty goal of curing disease, they are most interested in how to fix a broken market, starting with addressing a lack of data liquidity. Prior to speaking on next week’s SynBioBeta conferencethey shared some key insights about their overall picture.
“Our thesis is that the best way to solve these problems is to engage patients as a platform to drive and fund research. So we think of Molecule as a Kickstarter-like marketplace for translation work for these communities,” explains Weisser, Chief Ecosystem Development Officer. In other words, to solve problems in the doctor’s office, Molecule wants to put patients in the driver’s seat, with the data that allows them to be treated in the first place.
Molecule isn’t just a “version” of Biology Kickstarter. More definitively, it’s a conglomeration of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (commonly known as DAOs) built around a cryptocurrency protocol that decentralizes funding and intellectual property. By using this protocol and its tools—particularly IP-NFTs, or non-exchangeable intellectual property tokens—to tokenize sponsored research agreements, Molecule aims to make these aspects of the research process more transferable and liquid. “Both data and data science talent are illiquid, and this is a technology problem,” claims Weisser. “How do we find knowledge without giving up the proprietary stuff? Moving data rooms from the paper age to the digital age is part of that.” Rather than more centralized information-sharing agreements, these IP-NFTs are designed to encourage participation and collaboration in a much larger environment with more embedded liquidity, without the need for actual innovations to be patented.
Kohlhaas, as co-founder and CEO of Molecule, cites his background in economics and interest in systems thinking and design as fundamental to his understanding of problems arising from centralizing authorities in terms of funding, replication, competition and communication. “Incentives for bringing drugs to market are not to cure, but to treat people and build sustainable business models around drugs,” he argues. “So in response to this, we can tie IP rights to a research agreement with an NFT as the digital bearer of that asset, making it easier to transact with IP, rather than having to use an equity vehicle. Given how the system works, this is a mechanism for faster funding and more valuable science assets that can be easily traded.
Molecule team.
This focus on intellectual property and funding forms the basis for a variety of thriving communities, focused on specific incentives and from diverse backgrounds, to spin the translation flywheel of intellectual property generation, for further funding to drive further research . This platform approach aims to bring patients, researchers and investors together to own and control IP through these tokens – taking back control from the powerless doctor visit.
Part of this exercise in governance includes being able to prioritize the types of research to pursue, and one of those overlooked areas for Molecule is longevity research. “Treating aging is like a vaccine. It is important to be open to new paradigms of disease treatment, and crypto-based communities are one step ahead of the medical establishment in seeing where it could go,” argues Weisser. “We could end up with cheaper drugs if you treat the root cause of the disease, as opposed to the fragmented diseases you might otherwise get, for example many different cancers.”
Specifically, this focus on longevity within Molecule has taken the form of VitaDAO. Membership includes people who contribute money or time in the form of work; in return, they receive governance tokens that allow them to vote on proposed research projects, for example. Membership based on contributed work is one of the ways this “Bio DAO” differs from other investment DAOs, and the infrastructure is designed to prioritize people as patients over more traditional shareholders or other forms of stakeholders.
“Users need to participate in a reliable system,” says Kohlhaas. “This kind of work lowers the risks of systemic failure and fatal errors by focusing on shared values and self-governance through token economics.” For both Weisser and Kohlhaas, some of these changes in how people interact with human health are merely a harbinger of future benefits from the larger Decentralized Science (or DeSci) movement. “In general, we’re trying to study what’s wrong with science funding and figure out how to fix it,” Weisser points out. “It is too bureaucratic, slow and centralized, so we need to make it as fast, digital, easy and non-bureaucratic as possible. Instead of things being centrally owned by one government agency, it belongs to a community that cares and wants to bring things to market.”
Within the world of Molecule, the space for multiple communities to thrive is already taking shape with several research DAOs. Using an accelerator-like set of best principles to build more efficiently in web3, bio.xyz partnered with Molecule to help launch Bio DAOs in the area Synthetic biology, hair loss, psychedelics, women’s health, and more. “This isn’t just a moral problem, it’s an economic problem,” Kohlhaas points out. “I want to live in a Star Trek world. How do we get there? How do we get abundance?” Molecule certainly points the way to such a future, one atom at a time.
Thanks to Aishani Aatresh for additional research and reporting on this article. I am the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about, including Molecule, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta Conference And weekly summary.