Martin Shkreli — notorious former pharmaceutical director new from prison after his 2017 conviction for fraud—Announced his latest brow lift project this week: the creation of a blockchain-based Web3 Traffic drug discovery platform in himself electronic moneyMSI, aka Martin Shkreli Inu.
The platform, which is still in the early stages of development, is called Drugbased on a press release It was circulated on July 25. Its goals seem lofty, but the details are extremely sketchy, and Shkreli’s intentions have caused skepticism. It is also unclear whether the business runs Shkreli because of the Lifetime ban on pharmaceutical industrystemming from the sudden and callous 4,000% price increase of a life-saving drug that made him famous.
Shkreli, who is known as the co-founder of Drug, said the platform aims to make early-stage drug discovery more affordable and accessible. “Druglike will remove barriers to drug discovery at an early stage, boost innovation, and enable a broader group of collaborators to share pieces,” Shkreli said in a press release. reward. “Underserved and underfunded communities, such as those focused on rare diseases or in developing markets, will also benefit from access to these tools.”
In general, early-stage drug development can sometimes involve virtual screens to identify potential drug candidates. In these cases, pharmaceutical scientists first identify a “target”—a specific compound or protein that plays an important role in the development of a disease or condition. The researchers then look for compounds or small molecules that might interfere with that target, sometimes binding or “fastening” directly to the target in a way that prevents it from working. This can be done in physics laboratories using the large library of compounds in the high-throughput chemistry monitor. But it can also be done virtual, using specialized software and lots of computing power, which can be resource intensive.
Concepts and questions
That’s where the imagined Shkreli’s Druglike comes in. In a white paper Posted on Druglike’s website, Jason Sommer affiliated with Shkreli gives some concept of how the company’s platform will work. It will essentially use a decentralized computational network of task providers, solvers, and validators that will run and optimize the virtual screening of drug candidates. The white paper draws similarities with FoldIt, an online puzzle game basically uses distributed computing and community sourcing to fold proteins and predict their structure.
But Druglike’s platform is touted as combining blockchain concepts and cryptocurrency trading as users complete tasks, such as attaching to a screen. For example, the paper describes the concept of “optimization proof” as a “new” blockchain-based verification step for job screening, similar to Bitcoin’s “proof-of-work” method.
“We propose a blockchain-based Proof-of-Optimization implementation, where a distributed ledger stores a record of which Solver proof-of-work belongs to. Smart Contracts enable the secure distribution of rewards to Resolvers who possess verified proofs,” wrote Sommer in the article.
For now, however, the white paper only loosely describes these concepts, and it’s not clear how value-added cryptocurrency transactions will create. It is also unclear how the project will be funded, although an online exchange suggests that the company may consider to finance venture capital.
On Twitter, where Shkreli has been banned, he currently has an account Enrique Hernandez @ zkEnrique7. From that, Shkreli announced the company on July 25 and hold a chat about the project.
During that conversation, he scoffed at the idea that the platform would violate his lifetime ban on the pharmaceutical industry, saying the project was only concerned with developing software, not drugs. . “Writing some code in Github and hitting ‘go’ doesn’t make you a pharmaceutical company,” he said.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
