Patients, not profits, should drive drug discovery | Vibe Bio, Alok Tayi

Transcript

this episode is brought to you by paris swap the leading aggregator to find best prices across various decks you'll hear more about them later in the show that experience the insight came to me that in many of these circumstances we have tremendous hope that a treatment would come up but unfortunately lack the capital to be able to actually advance that treatment into patients and so the insight was that the problem especially in diseases like rare diseases and other overlooked diseases the problem is not finding a potential cure it's funding it [Music] welcome back everyone uh we have a very special guest today alok um taiyi uh he is the co-founder of vibe bio which i

have a pleasure being an investor in uh so there will be some bias but i want to make this episode um you know also dig deep into what we call applying a lot of the incentives in crypto um that we've seen historically bitcoin and ethereum and and and applying those to healthcare and one of the areas that i feel really passionately about which is uh and i've as a side you know i love crypto but i also love healthcare and biotech and there's a lot of problems there that i think can be addressed with better incentive models and mechanisms that we've explored in crypto so this would be a fascinating i think a fascinating deep dive i hope that eloque not only will give you a an overview of what they're doing by bio which combines a lot of really interesting features of web 3 and crypto but also just really

dig deep into what are the problems in in research and development direct development uh and discovery um and hopefully uh you know i think uh we will get a better understanding of what the potential really is to to fix healthcare um and i think it's one of the more promising areas and if this truly works i mean i think there's a lot of criticisms out there in the space you know a lot of this is just ponzinonomics and yield farming and and we're really going and if bitcoin's really gonna work but i think um you know this is one of the areas where if it works then it could really transform healthcare feels real to a lot of us you know we all have family members or know of people that unfortunately you know struggle from rare diseases which is one of the topics we're going to talk about here and

you're going to learn why that area in particular has been largely neglected by big pharma and so without further ado uh hello welcome to the pod we're thrilled to have you um uh welcome yeah thanks so much really uh pleasure to be here and i'm grateful for your time and the opportunity to be able to share a little bit about vive as well as what we're doing at the intersection of crypto and the biotech industry awesome and so congrats on officially launching uh buy bios round yesterday it was a two million dollar round uh with some really good investors so first off maybe tell us a little bit about that and then um the idea behind starting this perhaps layering in your background into that yeah 100 um so yeah appreciate the the kind words and so uh yeah we were really excited uh

vibe announced its first round of financing la uh earlier this week we're uh thrilled to be able to raise 12 million dollars led by initialized capital i have a whole host of amazing investors including yourself naval um diego ray um leo hippo amongst a suite of other uh great investors um and you know the big part about that announcement was in addition to be able to raise that capital we also announced two partnerships uh one with a patient advocacy group called chelsea's hope the other called nf2 biosolutions to launch our first two drug programs in diseases uh specifically lafora disease and nf2 so we're really excited to be able to sort

of come out of the gate and sort of tell our story and also um share some of the great work we're doing um with real folks to help bring crypto into the biotech industry and so um happy to give you a little bit of insight into my background and sort of what uh the genesis of vibe was if that helps yeah absolutely let's say later kind of a context for folks uh how do you what is your background and what exactly is five bio for sure so uh i'm actually a scientist by trade and training i spent about 15 years the bench doing research uh and then caught the software bug and started a couple software companies focused on the life sciences industry and then mid last year my wife and i were fortunate enough to

have our first kid though the pregnancy went okay unfortunately our daughter was born very sick and spent a long time in the hospital suffering one of the hardest parts about that experience was the fact that though the diseases that she had were somewhat common and the biology were well understood there were actually no dedicated therapeutic options available to her and as a consequence she spent a long time in the hospital you know as a family we felt extremely frustrated abandoned and alone during that period but inevitably when you spend time in the nicu you actually start meeting a lot of other families who also have sick loved ones along your bedside and we started to realize more and more that a lot of the common challenges and

struggles we had around having a child who had an illness that we understood but i know therapeutic options actually end up becoming a common thread that tied us all together as a group and so it was from that experience the insight came to me that in many of these circumstances we have tremendous hope that a treatment would come up but unfortunately lack the capital to be able to actually advance that treatment into patients and so the insight was that the problem especially in diseases like rare diseases and other overlooked diseases the problem is not finding a potential cure it's funding it and so it was that kernel that led me to start by bio last year with my

co-founder the inimitable josh foreman so josh and i started by bio to be able to help bring a new approach to developing treatments initially focused on rare diseases and vibe bio is a community of patients scientists and partners that help identify and vet potential treatments initially on rare diseases and then fund them using cryptocurrency token sales and so when you juxtapose how families today try and tackle this problem you know the president and founder of nf2 biosolutions for instance um had to run multiple 5ks just to be able to raise enough money to advance treatments for that neuro-oncology indication and so today for the one in ten

americans who suffer from a rare disease you know we hope to be able to develop a new approach by which we can actually put the patient in the driver's seat not profit or politics when it comes to drug development that's fast and so um maybe for a skeptic out there might say wait a minute well there's a lot of vcs out there that are investing in biotech um and what is their role and why have they not jumped into the opportunity that you're seeing here yeah and you know i think it's really important to keep in mind here that uh there's no explicit sort of villain or um uh you know anyone with ill intent usually i think those are sort of rooted out pretty quickly in the biotech industry um i think in the context of how biotech companies operate especially when you're

vc backed first off over the past 20 to 30 years a lot of the exciting innovation in the life sciences industry has shifted from bigger pharma companies to a decentralized network of emerging biotech companies now when you're an emerging biotech company however even if you're vc-backed you'll always have capacity and resource constraints when it comes to developing your technology into a working medicine so what ends up happening is that any rational leader or manager will have to start to prioritize where they allocate their limited capacity and their novel technology and so naturally what ends up happening is they prioritize the largest disease areas which also represent the largest economic opportunities and therefore

increase the overall npv of their organization that focus on just one to two disease areas requires them then to de-prioritize the next dozen and that decision when integrated across the few thousand biotechs that are out there lead to unfortunately herd mentality so you have the entire industry focusing on a modest to small subset of diseases while the balance like rare diseases and other overlooked domains though they have good economic opportunities and have tractable science unfortunately don't get as much love and so i think this is a facet of how the life sciences industry operates that just unfortunately leads to a measurable amount of diseases being overlooked

now if it was any other industry we'd be okay with that because it just means that you know if i'm building sales force and sales force can't be applied to the construction industry then you know the construction industry would just be a little bit less efficient per se but in this segment and domain it reflects in the fact that um unfortunately people suffer and in many cases uh die as well and so it was from that certain context where there's you know 40 50 billion dollars a year invested in biotech venture in a given year very small portion of sort of early stage innovation and venture that motivates us to think about creating a new approach when it comes to the biotech side of the equation yeah absolutely so you mentioned that one in ten actually has a rare disease in

america at least um of course this is scattered across a number of rare diseases um and it's not which which i think is part of the problem here which is uh it takes what up to you know north of a billion up to two billion to develop a drug and the probability of developing a drug is sort of you applied like this sort of decision tree model um is quite low and so in that context maybe elaborate more on how bio in what particular area are you most focused on and how do you kind of i mean you've raised 12 million that's not a billion and so um how uh maybe explain to listeners how this will actually work what are the areas that you're mostly focused on

in the drug development kind of r d phase for sure you know if it's all right i'd love to take maybe one quick step back and put you in the shoes of a family who's just been told their child has been diagnosed with the rare disease and sort of give you a sense of kind of how they approach it today and then sort of how bi-bio dovetails so you know if you're a family member of a patient who's just diagnosed by rare disease the doctor informs you that though we understand the disease that there are no treatments i'm sure you can appreciate a very emotional and difficult time obviously the first instinct is to go and try and beg biotech and pharma companies to work on your disease area but as we discussed that often doesn't lead to much and so the result for many of these

families is basically on one hand billionaires and their generosity or bake sales and the volume on the other hand and so many of these groups for which there's uh now according to a recent report from rare x over 10 000 different rare diseases um a clear um you know challenge where you know unfortunately we believe there needs to be a better option that's different than billionaires in bake sales and so that's the context within which we're trying to come into the flight into the into the fold so in terms of the approach you know one of the few things i'd like to highlight here around rare diseases specifically is the fact that though the patient population is somewhat smaller you'll also also see a substantially

lower cost to actually be able to develop and advance the therapy in this space so first when it comes to you know these smaller to modified disease areas in terms of patient population you end up actually needing maybe only a few million dollars or maybe 10 or 15 million dollars to actually get a medicine through some of the more difficult stages of drug development as opposed to the hundreds of millions of dollars required in some larger disease areas like say cardiovascular disease or cancer so i think that's one really critical takeaway here is that in addition even though the um patient population is smaller the cost to actually develop a medicine are lower further when you actually look at the

costs on the health system there's a tremendous amount applied because of these rare diseases because they also have no existing treatment today so there's i think a unique opportunity for us to be able to bring these medicines to market quickly in comparison the current system so you know in terms of vibe bio the approach that we take is we think that every patient that has a life-altering disease no matter how rare deserves to be part of a community and have the power to pursue a cure so what we do is we're building this community of patients scientists and partners that help identify vet and then fund these different drug development programs and innovative ways so as i mentioned earlier we're going on actively partnering with patient

advocacy advocacy groups that currently are focused on a given disease area using their know-how and their insight into the disease the science the scientific leaders the medical kol's etc many of these groups are now putting forth proposals to the dao that structure a specific the study of a specific potential medicine for their disease and so the goal here is for to empower these patient communities those who truly understand the disease and have the most incentive to see it solved put forth a proposal around running a clinical trial doing pre-clinical testing manufacturing etc to help advance and develop that

medicine once that proposal comes to the dow the dao has a community of scientific experts and drug development veterans who help evaluate and stack rank those proposals based on scientific merit clinical uh facets safety regulatory et cetera and then we subsequently empower the community then approve funding for those ranked proposals so we leverage the token the vibe token which is our governance token to be able to raise some capital through external investors as we just alluded to but also grant those tokens those community members such the patients can truly be in the driver's seat of setting prioritize priorities and allocating that capital

so that's sort of the overall mechanics of kind of how vibe works today and to answer your other question in terms of drug development longer term you know i think very much so there's a lot of capital that's required to develop a suite of diseases to develop a suite of medicines but i think even again just a few million dollars to be able to advance in medicine to show that it works in a human for instance allows us to make tremendous progress and then potentially partner that medicine with an existing institution or raise more follow-on capital from traditional sources as well and so that's i think a big part of our model which is to say we want to plug in neatly into the existing regulatory and drug development infrastructure but ensure that actually the patient is at the center as opposed to profit or

politics yeah absolutely and so just um i guess historically for my curiosity just the listeners how much of existing treatments for rare diseases neglected diseases has happened in this in this manner meaning advocacy groups uh of people that are affected by it um actually put forth uh some modalities or some like interesting research and then that gets picked up by big pharma like is that the norm or or or is this kind of a pioneering model that you're you're developing it's an awesome question and to be candid you know we're drawing a lot of inspiration from how other communities have actually started to develop medicines for the diseases they've cared about over the past half century

for example the vaccine for polio the treatments for cystic fibrosis forms of hypertension pompeis etc were actually potent therapeutics that were pioneered by communities that came together when existing centralized institutions were focused elsewhere they formed a charity a community and then raised capital at least philanthropically to be able to invest in these drug development programs so i think the most canonical example is the work that the cystic fibrosis foundation has done over the past you know 30 40 years to develop treatments for cf the interesting thing about this is also i think highlighting the unique insight that communities and patients themselves have when cf

sort of first became a really well-known disease despite its size there were only 20 or 30 000 patients known in the united states and globally but as the sense of fibrosis foundation started to assemble their community identify potential patients and raise hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in direct development they were actually now finding that there's actually more than a quarter million patients that suffer from cystic fibrosis there's this natural growth that ends up happening once there's awareness and also once there's a therapeutic so in the case of cf the cystic fibrosis foundation invested in a company called aurora biosciences which was then acquired and today is actually vertex pharmaceuticals which is a 60 billion dollar plus market cap company that does

about four billion dollars in top line all from the cystic fibrosis medicines that they've developed so many of which were actually invested and developed uh and funded by the cystic fibrosis foundation so when you look at the work that they've done the march of dimes in terms of developing the vaccine for polio martine rothblatt who was actually the founder of siriusxm who then started united by therapeutics john crowley who started novazyme as well as now amicus therapeutics to treat his children with pompeis you see this common trend where again when communities come together and patients have a high unmet medical need legacy institutions are focused elsewhere these communities become

powerful sources of identifying the science and the capital to be able to push them forward we just hope to be able to learn from that success and put that model on steroids yeah absolutely and just uh again this is not a question but when you say most big pharma is kind of focused on developing another treatment for erectile dysfunction or whatever which you know is a problem but on the ground scheme of things we don't need another viagra in the market we need uh more dollars to go fund rare diseases i mean is that like a fair statement yeah you know i think i'll be maybe a little bit uh i'll massage the statement a little bit what i'd say is that you know if you put yourself in the shoes of a pharmaceutical company that has an obligation to shareholders in terms of

returning uh uh delivering a return on investment they have to make very calculated decisions that focus them on specific disease areas which will have a high uh economic return but also have lower like lower risk in terms of their development and so that's one of the other challenges in this space it's like a bit of a catch-22 which is for existing disease areas that we know about that have large market opportunities and a well-established clinical and regulatory pathway it makes a lot of sense for new technologies to be applied there in pharma to focus but the challenge with rare disease as we just discussed is that there are no existing treatments today and as a consequence when there's no existing treatment it's also unclear what the bar is that you need to cross in terms of

getting a medicine potentially approved and accepted by the community so there's also this component of risk that also i think gets factored into the prioritization for many of these institutions and i think it's safe to say that the current drug development infrastructure just wasn't built to focus on rare diseases specifically so our hope at vibe bio is to build a community of patients scientists and partners to help identify and vet potential treatments for rare diseases and fund them in innovative ways such that we can scalably and sustainably pursue treatments for rare diseases using the dow model at its sort at its core what has been the reception of the scientific community the scientists maybe comment on who's actually involved who's doing the

vetting and what's been the reception of a lot of these researchers and scientists to your model yeah absolutely so what i'll say is that this has been one of the most um the easiest projects i've ever had to work on and build because such a large portion of the industry despite what's talked about in the press i think truly cares about the patient and also wanting to work on programs and projects that will have a shot on goal and i think in many cases even as an innovative biotech it takes many years and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to even get to the point where you're starting a clinical trial in our case we can actually move in a much faster pace because we're partnering with patients directly

and are able to also bring in existing intellectual property and medicines that are closer to that point so the reception has been extraordinarily wonderful can't mention any names at the moment you know we'll be doing some additional discussion on that soon but we've got folks who have brought multiple drugs to market including drugs like spinraza have participated in bringing brinyura to market as well and these are hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of medicines uh that have been developed by these individuals coming to the forefront we're also actively building a scientific advisory board that has some of the most leading experts in neurology and our nobel laureates etc the table and i think what motivates every single

one of these individuals again is the opportunity to be proximal to the patient the opportunity to now bring their know-how and expertise to the table to be able to advance a candidate medicine that truly cannot only get into the clinic but then has a clear line of sight to approval and at the end of the day have an impact i think the other piece of this is there's also a lot of intriguing curiosity around how this broader business model and this domain of web 3 and community ownership could disrupt and transform we've got some really innovative and uh you know wonderful individuals who have been part of some of the most canonical biotechs here in boston for instance millennium pharma infinity

decibel thrive earlier detection etc that are actually also part of some very prominent biotech vc firms who are participating in this process because they see an opportunity by which this broad swath of disease we can actually potentially pursue so you know i think the the the uptake has been great the participation has been huge and i think it's only going to get amplified from here especially as we announce some of our subsequent partnerships with pharma and academia in the coming months i'm trying to understand why historically no one has kind of like thought about this or done it in the way that you're doing it is it just something inherently unique about the dow model the coordination that crypto allows in a very scalable kind of like internet

native way perhaps like but let's dig deep into that yeah so let me give you maybe just a couple quick thoughts love to hear you know if that sort of resonates with you i think the first part about it is that biotech companies and vc firms often have what they call patient advocacy groups which are sort of the liaisons beside between the organization the biotech and a patient advocacy group however i think the key gap ends up being is that the patient advocacy groups and the patients themselves don't necessarily have economics or governance right in terms of deciding priorities that's usually done by the biotechs and the management team so it ends up becoming a circumstance where they you know when tough decisions

have to be made programs are then cut and drug programs are are put on the shelf which unfortunately uh is to the negative uh implications for the patients and i think a part of it also is giving up economics then decreases the economics for other folks at the table especially those who are taking the financial risk so i think there's some aspect there around the capital the financial incentives as well as how decisions are made that i think make our model and approach different but also difficult for existing institutions to sort of adopt so the approach that we've been taking has been to bring the community together in a dow as you alluded leverage the

token as a way to incent and provide governance and a say an agency for these patients but then once a drug program is actually approved the actual funds from the dow then actually go into a dedicated c-corp biotech that has economic ownership from the dao as well as these patient advocacy groups and we believe that to be really critical because when you also give them skin in the game and ensure that they can see part of the upside in that drug program it then ensures that they're they're committed with you whether it's finding the scientists working with regulatory authorities which is super important as well as even finding patients to enroll in a trial so i think our innovation both in terms

of how we make decisions but also the economic structure i think are our facets that are highly differentiated and just sort of go against the grain in terms of the current incentive structure in the industry yeah how do you um so so you've raised this capital um you have maybe 10 different hundreds of or thousands of rare diseases how do you prioritize this for sure well you know i think the the key part of you know web 3 is to ensure that it's done in a decentralized community driven way so uh when i say we or i i really mean the dao as a whole as opposed to myself and i think the approach that we take here is that i think there's this

healthy tension that we have to keep i think anyone out there who's going to be part of the vibe bio community is going to want to see every drug have a shot on goal and every disease have potential to be treated but at the end of the day we need to be ensuring that the capital we're allocating is going towards programs of the highest potential the highest patient impact also such that if it's successful we can return capital back to continue reinvesting into new programs and so that tension is between the humanity and the altruism that the bio community has but also ensuring that we're meeting certain scientific regulatory and safety expectations so the approach that we take is to empower communities with tokens patient

communities specifically um enable any token holder to put forth a proposal around advancing candidate medicine into a clinical trial um you know whether it be say the manufacturing aspect or the clinical trial itself for pre-clinical testing but then ensure that after those proposals are provided to the dow that we have a team of experts who are sort of reviewing them and ranking them so what we do is we evaluate things like you know the regulatory pathway the clinical development plan the manufacturability even the financial plan related to the capital that's being requested you know if they're asking for 10 grand to do a 10 000 person clinical trial there's

probably a mismatch there and so we have deep domain experts whose responsibility isn't necessarily to say yes or no but instead to render their expertise just they would in any other drug development circumstance to ensure that proposal is properly structured and also vetted for being the best possible chance for a medicine to to get to market patients so we think that diligent step is really critical and then once that diligent step is complete they'll have ranked and create a stack essentially of those final proposals with the highest potential highest impact programs at the top and then cascading from there such that whatever funds are approved or available

can then be allocated sort of top down as a consequence so it becomes a community driven approach that allows experts to help weigh in to ensure we're making good decisions but then empowers then experts on the back end once the community approves to be able to do the drug development work on a day-to-day basis so i'm an investor i get tokens but i have no domain expertise as much as i love this i'm not the most competent person to vote on on the merits of these proposals um how do you plan on creating a sufficiently decentralized community whereby do i delegate my vote to a particular expert in neurology or some other field um and and what's the incentive for these scientists and

researchers to uh participate uh are you granting them tokens are they investors are they buying these tokens or i'm just kind of curious how you because a lot of what we've seen in these dials you know is a high degree of concentration and oftentimes a lot of these people are voting with their feet if they are even showing up and so like participation is pretty low in this case there's a lot of motivated people but may not be may not have the expertise to qualifications to vote on the merits of these proposals i think you hit a really important point there uh and i'd say when it comes to uh how we try to engage with a broader pool of participants delegation i think is a really critical

facet of that in terms of just patient advocacy groups alone in the united states there's tens of thousands of them globally it's a many multiples of that and so it empowers um and in life sciences industry across the globe there's something like 13 million people who participate in the life sciences industry today so as we try and build the largest collective of patients scientists and partners i think there's an opportunity for folks like yourselves and other token holders to be able to delegate their vote to those tens of thousands of patient communities millions of sort of scientists as well in the ecosystem to help ensure that they're bringing their insights to the table as well but regardless even from a delegation perspective because we've structured it

such that you know token holders can propose but we have experts that we're still fairly confident that we'll be hopefully making good decisions on the back end but you know i think it's safe to say that dow retention and engagement is still an open question in the industry but i hope as you mentioned that the commitment and the conviction and the fact that this topic hits close to home to so many keeps people engaged on an ongoing basis the other thing i'll just quickly add is that you know when josh and i think through the mechanics and the governance scheme here i think also ensuring that we're focusing people's time and focus on specific time points when these proposals are supposed to be submitted reviewed and then approved i think also

helps focus people as opposed to having this continuous stream of decision making and so the scientists that we work with are paid through tokens such that they're also incented for the long term and can carry some of the upside that comes with the community being successful as well yeah absolutely all right everyone really excited to share a special update from our friends at paris swap pair swap has been pushing the boundaries of what is possible with d5 for years and they just did it again they just rolled out the first ever nft peer-to-peer mobile trading app on ios that's right they launched an ios app for peer-to-peer nft trading you can buy and sell nfts with any token they have a secure non-custodial wallet

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communities some of which are just being neglected and or reliant on you know very generous individuals that you know can work at times but it's not very sustainable model um i want to ask you is this an adverse election problem meaning the the potential like the more promising treatments or you know that are showing traction or diseases that are farther along and have more line of sight and being approved are probably getting picked up by very reputable vcs um and or pharma companies biotech companies and then you're kind of left with this important but tail end of kind of more neglected

less clear diseases very important don't get me wrong but still the probabilities of that are are much lower um i'm curious if you believe that to be true of this adverse election problem that you're going to be facing yeah you know it's a really important question i think was one of the common ones we uh faced when it came to uh our fundraise and actually i'd love to dispel that notion sort of fairly swiftly because first the rare disease space actually has a higher rate of approval than uh larger indication areas and so i think something like almost like twice as many um that sort of enter the clinic um actually end up getting

approved in comparison to sort of other domains so that's like one important facet second i'd also i guess on that point b before we go any further is it is this because the fda has sort of these emergency status um kind of incentives to to kind of approve these or it has more leniency towards improving more of these exploratory treatments it's a really good question i would actually argue it's that right now there is no treatment available today and so your bar is different your bar is unfortunately people dying or having like real serious symptoms and and poor quality of life so i think when it's so egregious in terms of the current outcome uh with rare diseases that any medicine that's

able to incrementally improve quality of lifespan yeah like als treatment the airless treatment out there by this japanese pharma like is not like doing much other than prolonging life by like two or three months uh because the lungs is what fails first right and so i remember looking at this stuff and it's like it's not that it's curing the disease it's just that it's marginally improving the condition of a patient and so it gets approved much faster perhaps than a cardiovascular um kind of more you know treatment or cancer treatment right is that bigger i think that's like one good one way to think about it which is yeah again anything we can do to improve the quality of life as well as the lifespan of folks with rare diseases tends to get a good look i think from the fda because there are also no treatments today and

as a consequence i think the patient communities are very vocal and engaged with the regulatory authorities to ensure that they're giving a fair shake right to those who have uh candidate medicines so that's one thing to think about um so the other piece that i'd also highlight here in tandem is that when it comes to the current drug development process you actually alluded to at the beginning of this of the discussion which is it takes a billion or two billion dollars actually to bring a given medicine to market in the aggregate so i'd actually push back on the concept of adverse selection and that i think our current infrastructure spends a fair amount of capital today for a lot of medicines that unfortunately don't pass muster and so i think our approach of being

very very focused on a specific set of indications in a specific space where first we can start to develop intuition and instinct across the dao to evaluate and vet these programs that's where we're bringing experts who've worked on drugs like spin raza and bernier to the table but then second over time you can envision that the dow can start to build up a shared service model that actually starts to decrease the costs and improve insights across the multiple programs that we step up you know best practice on which vendors should we be working with what's the right way to manage all the data coming from a clinical trial how do we think about patient recruitment how do we think about staffing even right and motivating these teams i think there's another piece of this which daos are also uniquely positioned

to do which is to bring best practices bring the right talent to the table help them coordinate give them a little bit of capital and then sort of see what they can do so you know i i can appreciate sort of what the broader industry kind of thinks about this space but i just push back on that sort of assumption because you know i think our the current process is definitely inefficient everyone knows it's got to improve i think the rare disease space actually has shown statistically it has a higher likelihood of approval compared to other disease areas and then also we have an opportunity to learn collectively and grow and decrease the costs over time improve the conversion over time as the dow starts to build up a collective knowledge base yeah i mean it certainly rings through like open sourcing a lot

of this stuff there might be a lot of clinical trial data that has been shelved and is not available so over time over the next 5-10 years you would envision that you're collecting a lot of this and open sourcing it to advance science as opposed to the you know which is not at odds with making a financial return i mean at some point i think you've been very clear here which is there is a profit motive here like patient but everyone kind of wins more equitably the patients the dow you know investors uh maybe service providers that are being paid in tokens not necessarily in cash or what have you so so that certainly kind of rings true i guess i want to um shift a little bit of my attention into kind of what is the grand vision here like where do you see

by bio in the next five 10 years like do you think that you will get biotech investors vcs pharma into the fold research institutions you know a lot of this my understanding happens initially in universities um and so what are your plans on building this community because right now it seems like there's a few experts it's us investors but also um you know patients uh uh and patient populations but i'm curious like what are your plans of the next 12 24 months and where do you see kind of bio evolving yeah well you know i think our goal in the near term is to get uh is to open up our community and welcome as many patients scientists and partners to the table

i think our also our goal also and during that period of time is also to launch uh our token such that we can have uh you know on-chain governance and participation from a broader group of people but i think in terms of building out the community we'd love to work with every patient advocacy group and every biotech company out there that has a disease area that they're passionate about a high potential drug program that sort of has tremendous promise but just lacks the capital and the capacity to be able to advance into these later stages of development to give patients hope and show the promise you know i think that's really the core of where we're focused and i think you're going to see over the next couple months some of the attraction we're getting with pharma companies academic institutions to help take that

technology which would have unfortunately sat on a shelf somewhere now actually give it a shot on goal and get it into people so i think that's going to be the two key milestones for us but then longer term i really hope over the next you know let's call it two five ten years to be able to then start to think about a broader vision for how vibe evolves i'll give you one web three sort of vector and then sort of one biotech vector which is in the case of web3 you know one of the amazing things and powerful facets of dao's and crypto is that everything we do from a governance perspective or from a token standpoint is all instantiated in code so even though we're focused on rare

diseases today for a variety of reasons both my personal experience and exposure but then also in terms of the capital required to move the needle you can envision taking that same governance structure approach and model and then it re replicating it for other high priority disease areas that are overlooked you mentioned als infectious disease mental health addiction women's health etc etc etc it becomes a unique opportunity by which we can now start to replicate this broader model bring the right partners and patients to the table and advance and scale out the pursuit of drug development especially in this critical phase when we're going from in vitro proof of concept to human proof of concept so that's one vector

the other vector i'd also say is that if we're actually able to build a large collection of patients scientists and partners and again leveraging web three can be a global entity that can scale effectively infinitely in terms of participation there's a world where we could become the largest biopharma organization with a very large quantity of resources available to us so imagine not only building out hundreds of drug programs but even some of the core infrastructure that you alluded to earlier our own analytics and insights from clinical data and pre-clinical data sets the ability to actually even build our own manufacturing facilities or um you know regulatory writing infrastructure etc i think there becomes a really unique

opportunity whereby this broader community can now start to allocate capital to alleviate some of the bottlenecks that exist in drug development today running uh pre-clinical testing doing uh manufacturing supply chain reshoring that decentralizing it however you want to think about it there's i think a really unique opportunity by which the supply chain can be modernized and community owned but then also a lot of the business processes like paying out royalties or having an nda can potentially be instantiated into smart contracts so i know i've through thrown a lot of sort of pieces out there but i think it really comes out first looking at from the perspective how we leverage this common code base then replicate it for sort of new disease areas and take advantage of hopefully

the good governance that we've put in place here in vibe but then second also start to think about this broader concept of community ownership not just around the intellectual property but also around the supply chain and infrastructure but then also even business process and think about how the technology and communities can have a positive impact there as well so that's uh that's kind of the the next uh five six years of uh hopefully what you and everyone else on the calf table has uh signed up for but uh yeah hopefully that answers your question no absolutely and like i guess the the emphasis on that question is like how you know what version of this world just doesn't work like what are the things that you see as the biggest risks um you've raised a small amount all things considered when it comes to biotech i mean it's a drop in the bucket

uh sort of a initial initial capital to prove out as you see a proof of concept here but what are the biggest risks that you that you worry about here yeah well you know i think the one thing that i'd highlight here is that if you look at say the xbi which is an etf that represents a collection of biotech names from its peak in 2021 to its trough in 2022 has been down 60 percent right that brought like crypto volatility so it's so funny right like you know as we have some of these interviews with the press you know they often you know sort of highlight hey you know crypto there's some interesting things going on and i and i simply revert them back to actually i think it's a broader macro challenge where you see high potential industries even like biotech which has

tremendous traditional capital invested in it also going through its own issues and so i think i bring this example up in part because um unfortunately disease doesn't care about interest rates first off but then second that challenge of raising traditional public market uh equity from by public market equities um translates into private market constraints in terms of capital so we're seeing a lot of excitement around our model in part because we can bring a new source of capital which is 10 20 30 times larger than what's out there right now in biotech to the fold so that's first but second you know i think to answer your question around what uh are the challenges we're going to be facing

potentially i think one part of it is uh to your ear to our early discussion ensuring that we're going after the right disease areas and the right candid medicines that either get approved or get picked up by existing institutions to take the last mile to pick up the baton you know many of the successful biotech companies that are out there actually did not develop their their lead medicine or their most successful medicine themselves you know millennium is a great example which was a 10 billion dollar outcome to take a decade plus ago in their case they actually bought a company which had developed a drug called velcade which ended up becoming the high potential program that takeda purchased millennium for so i think in our case can we actually

develop medicines and choose make good decisions around which disease areas and which medicines we developed can we pass on the baton whether it be from a commercial standpoint or from a partnership standpoint on those candidate medicines and then most importantly can we also build a vibrant and engaged community with the right types of stakeholders you know i think it's safe to say there's a lot of um uh different incentives that exist in the crypto industry amongst what three investors and i think we want to make sure that we bring the right types of people to the table to make sure we make those good decisions for the long haul as well so hopefully that gives you a little bit of sense of some of the areas that we're looking to shore up and what we want to be able to de-risk right in the coming 12 to 24 months

uh see that i have a family member which i do my middle sister is kind of has a rare disease so say that there's a proposal that is set forth i get really excited i go out and like acquire this token or or ask for delegations like i want to influence research like how does a how does that work like how do you think about like the you're ascribing a value to a token um and i just want to go out there buy this token to get a proposal passed why not just skip all that and somehow invest in and donate these proceeds to or invest in a venture fund like thinking more on the perspective of the user yeah for sure well you know i think um let's take that last comment real quick

right invest in a venture fund there's only about a dozen or so sort of venture funds that are dedicated to biotech that are out there and i think if you are someone who's passionate about a given disease area one having access to that sort of uh fund asset class i think is very difficult but then second also typically you have to like be qualified and you need to invest you know at least a million dollars or whatever so yeah and many and many more right and i think the challenge with again a centralized sort of set of investors is that you know their focus and and what they sort of see as in vogue right is very different than perhaps what you do as a patient with you know a family member who's who's ill so i think in our case one uh it provides a lot more scalability of

access and participation and say and i think those communities can certainly participate from a patient perspective that's why we grant tokens for free to these patient advocacy groups but what i'd hope is that you know the way that over time as these medicines are successful as capital starts to come back to the dow and as we start to build up a relationship of doing what we say we're going to do that there will be greater demand for the participation in this overall community whether it be from investors from partners from uh charities etc which will continue to boost and increase the value of the token the second i'd also highlight is that i think there's a unique opportunity whereby we could potentially leverage

this technology to empower patients to not only have control and have unprecedented ownership over the drug development process but also unprecedented ownership of their data right i think one of the unique opportunities that crypto provides is the opportunity to be able to put your data on chain make it accessible and monetizable in variety of ways which i think currently is done by a small subset of companies but instead could actually be put back in the hands of patients by which they could too earn economics um leveraging the sort of tokenized type structure so i think there's a lot of ways in which if we can build a community ensure that these community of patients scientists and partners are making good decisions and able to invest in drug

development programs that are successful there's gonna be a suite of other sort of capabilities and uses for that token that'll emerge that extend into data financing as well as replicating this model over time to other domains as well yeah the last thing i want to talk about is ip that has been historically an area that has been challenging for health care uh that you know a lot of it is you know big pharma might do a lot of these chemical trials they don't share that data um they shelf the program and a lot of the acquisitions into space historically have been like hey like royven for instance go out there and says oh actually i think that i want to revisit this particular clinical trial that acquires that ip and then turns out that there's a lot of promise there and and at least your drug

development which is you know a pretty interesting success story um i am curious how you think about ip in this context where there's a big community element but also you need to be sensitive i guess maybe the broader question is does ip matter and if so how do you navigate and like kind of um yeah yeah how do you handle that yeah for sure so you know let me give you a sort of like two different facets of kind of this equation i think the first is that though the specific data might be held close to the vest by a given pharma company chemical structure you know aspects of sort of clinical

trial outcomes etc are actually sort of publicly discussed and i think when you bring together a community that has a common mission as my bio is to finding every cure for every community we hope we can bring more dedicated eyeballs with the right expertise to the table on this initial intellectual property in the first place you alluded to it earlier which is you know academic institutions for instance are part of the the mix but the expertise that academia has tends to be in the early stage science if we can actually build a pool of not only scientists but also drug development experts and patients think about the uh serendipity and the opportunity to glean those new insights that can emerge as people start to collaborate and

coordinate with an adult type structure that's like the first facet i want to highlight but then the second facet as we talked about our model once a given set of proposals are approved the capital associated with those with those programs approved by the community is then goes into funding those direct development programs which are housed in a given c corp that c-corp is what houses the actual intellectual property does the drug development work uh etc and the interesting thing about it is that when you also have economics from that c-corp also held by the patient community you have a new set of stakeholders now who have a say in what happens with that intellectual property that data over time they become way more aggressive about saying if this medicine works let's go

find other disease areas that we can potentially impact positively even if the economics aren't great because as a community we believe that we want to allocate our funds and work to helping others that's one the other is in the event that the drug you know might not work unfortunately there's an opportunity to start as you mentioned open sourcing that data and sharing those learnings because again the broader incentive here is to be able to bring as many medicines to market as safely and as quickly as possible as opposed to keeping things close to that best in this circumstance so i'll just sort of leave you with those sort of two facets of how ip could potentially play in this in this circumstance and i think in terms of the constraints a little bit less around

the the contracting and the technology and more about the incentives and the expectations of the individuals at the table and the capital that's being put to work here which you know i believe to be fundamentally different than sort of more traditional sources that are out there in biotech yeah um how many folks are on the team now full time as kind of contributors and and for anyone listening out there like i think we all know like one or two degrees unfortunately of this is a topic that you know hits home to most people and probably want to get involved but what are the best ways where can people find out more about what you're doing what are the major roles that you want to fill that you haven't filled yet

um so maybe we can just go from there yeah so we would love to have hear from the broader community whether it be from web3 from biotech from patient communities uh at vibe and so you can go to vibebio.com that's v-i-b-e-b-i-o-dot-com or find us on twitter at vibe underscore bio and i think in terms of the team today we're really fortunate to have about a team let's call it around 10 or so folks across both our technology and therapeutics functions we've got a broader community now of probably a few dozen individuals across patient advocacy groups scientific teams drug development teams as well as

services partners and so we're now working to open up that community so anyone who's excited about what we're trying to do and this intersection of biotech healthcare and web3 would love for you to come and join the community and and share a little bit about yourself with us um and in terms of full-time opportunities you know we're rapidly hiring obviously you know want to be able to put this capital to good work in order to help as many patients as possible and and and show what biotech and web 3 can do together so whether you're a front-end engineer or a back-end web 3 engineer whether you're a designer a community manager uh social media marketer you know we're looking for a broad swath of roles especially from a web 3 and technology perspective so that's our

core and ethos and philosophy but also we will be growing on the scientific side as well so you know folks who have actually been program leads at various uh for various medicines and we'll be hiring for you know csos and chief medical officers and heads of regulatory and things you know we're fortunate to have a few great folks in our sphere already in that space but um i really think this is a unique opportunity by which whether you're uh a rust developer or experience in solidity versus um uh uh someone who's worked on antisense electric nucleotides an opportunity for folks of all stripes to be able to come to the to the table and

be able to see how this novel technology and crypto and blockchain can be applied to uh this really important societally beneficial domain of of biotech and healthcare yeah that's incredible um yeah i i mean i've been public about this but this is one of the areas that i i feel like if it works it's highly asymmetric and has it can have such a profound impact positive impact um and and i think in many ways like you're left wondering like you know the last 12 years we've designed very interesting incentives to build monetary systems and non-sovereign stores of value i.e bitcoin to settle value in transactions and like

trustless systems which is pretty remarkable and a lot of the experimentation my background's in game theory is in you know it's a very adversarial system and so you have to think about incentives and all the stakeholders and look i mean we haven't nailed it in many ways but there's a lot of a lot of experimentation going on around types of voting like quadratic voting and types of funding models that are more sustainable and types of coordination mechanisms both capital and information and i think in many ways it's like well why like while healthcare struggles from a lot of incentive problems um it's not just on the r d side it's really the healthcare system as a whole um is is pretty broken at least in the us and so

uh you know the idea that like you know the us is one you know one of the richest not the richest country in the world per capita and um you know has the best institutions the best research uh but somehow you know life expectancy is going down and so the help you know the costs are pretty high and people don't have access to cheap health care and so it's kind of perplexing to me that's an area that is going to we have the i think if this works it probably set the a path forward to exploring other areas in the health care system not just r d to apply these incentives and kind of you know fix the system in many ways um i don't know if you would agree with that uh but i think that the vision or the opportunity to apply a lot of these

crypto modalities incentives and mechanisms is there to kind of um the potential there it's going to be long term but and highly ambitious but i think it's possible i think you're you're 100 right you know crypto i think has opened up two interesting uh areas of innovation one is obviously on the technology side but i think the other that might be less discussed but you alluded to is the opportunity to re-engineer not just software and databases and whatnot but also incentives and i think when you think about that fundamental aspect of re-engineering incentives it opens up i think a lot of opportunities and start taking this technology and philosophy and mindset into legacy institutions that aren't

necessarily serving a large portion of the their intended market and so i think in the context of biotech our hope here is to be able to show what this technology and set of incentives can be done specifically within our domain but then hopefully inspire other industry-focused dows what we call industry dows right to emerge that can start to think about their own incentive structure their own ecosystem of partners their own types of capital and uses of them to start solving other broader problems and i think that's going to be a really impactful outcome hopefully of the next one to two years which is those individuals who start to get fed up with their existing

service providers or or legacy institutions can now start to take advantage of these open permissionless tools to go start something themselves and so we hope just to be able to be an inspiration for that uh broadly but also hopefully do some good in the rare disease and biotech world that's amazing i'm super happy that we got a chance to chat i don't know if there's anything else as we kind of come to an end here that you want to impress upon our listeners um any parting thoughts but otherwise i mean i really kind of enjoyed this discussion you know how i feel about what you're doing i think uh you know it's it's one of the projects that i'm most passionate about for obvious reasons but uh i'm curious anything else you want to cover uh while we have you here you know just a note of thanks to you

for both being a a great vocal advocate for us as well as the broader community for for the time here today i know i think i'll just leave you with the thought that you know i think for the first time vibe bio is creating a community of patients scientists and partners to help identify and vet potential medicines in the rare disease space and fund them using cryptocurrency token sales we're really excited now to be able to put patients in the driver's seat of drug development not profits and politics such that any patient with a life-altering disease can have a community as well as the power to pursue a cure incredible well look thank you so much for your time now you're incredibly busy especially now that you're public and i can't imagine the inbounds that you're getting uh but listeners you know

if this if this hits close to home uh you know where to find a local definitely reach out uh there's a lot of opportunity there and and order us and we can direct you in the right in the right way uh but otherwise thanks everyone for listening logan thank you so much for your time i really appreciate it thank you talk soon [Music]