“A biotech or pharma company has a wealth of technology that can be applied to any number of diseases,” says Alok Tayi, founder and head of a new DAO-inspired biotech initiative, Vibe Bio. “But [big pharma companies] focus on the largest diseases they can pursue with that technology. An organization has to focus on the top one or two to maximize [investor returns].”
Vibe Bio wants to change the incentive structure by attracting patients and families directly affected by rare diseases into the drug funding and research process. For Tayi, it’s a deeply personal mission. He spent 16 years as a lab researcher before becoming a biotech entrepreneur. And he has all-too direct experience with rare diseases.
“Unfortunately, our daughter was born very sick, and spent a lot of time in the hospital suffering,” he said. “One of the facets of being in the NICU [Neonatal Intensive Care Unit] with a sick loved one is that you end up spending time with other families with sick loved ones, including many suffering from rare diseases.”
“Rare diseases, though the patient population is small, the economic opportunity is still there,” said Tayi. “Your costs are substantially lower because you don’t need thousands of patients” to conduct studies, for instance.
“[Groups] come to Vibe as part of our community,” said Tayi, “with proposals to fund a potential treatment. Then the scientific side of the community can then review those proposals for things like safety and regulatory protocols. Based on that review, those scientists can rank the proposals for funding.”
“Once the community has authorized capital for a particular proposal, we set up a C-corp that pursues [that project],” Tayi said. “That C-corp is jointly owned by the DAO and the [patient] advocacy organization. We believe the advocacy group to be a secret sauce. We want to give them unprecedented control over the development of a candidate medicine.”
Vibe Bio’s novel structure would also leverage the decentralization of bioscience itself over the past two decades. According to Tayi, biotech is becoming plug-and-play, or “virtualized,” in much the same way software development has.
“You can hire in executive staff for a particular biotech company to develop [a drug] or even build up a pipeline. In biotech, you can do that with a much leaner staff … You can have a dozen or even half a dozen people, who may or may not even be full time. This model has been proven out over decades.”
There are still some details to be determined, including precisely how communities will interact with Vibe Bio, the role of tokens and the overall legal structure. Tayi admits he and his legal team are still working through the nuances.
This content was originally published here.
