Currently, 1000s of otherwise viable unmonopolizable therapies are ignored by the pharmaceutical industry because a monopoly price cannot be enforced. We call them public good medicines because once the treatment protocol is published, it is not possible to stop people accessing the therapy from multiple sources (non-excludable) and use of the treatment protocol does not prevent others from using it (non-rivalrous). 

Unfortunately, this causes a tragedy of the commons which means that pharma companies will not fund the large clinical trials needed for them to be reimbursed by health insurers or obtain regulatory approval. Governments and health insurers also do not want to take on the political risk of paying for large clinical trials in case they fail, which means these treatments will typically not be accepted by the mainstream medical establishment. They include repurposed off-patent generic drugs, supplements, plant medicines, psychedelics, diets, and non-pharmaceutical / lifestyle interventions.

We can solve this tragedy of the commons and provide a high impact use case for web3 that unlocks billions of dollars in social value for relatively low cost by establishing an Impact Market that incentivises impact investors to fund IP-NFTs representing public good medicines. Successful clinical trial data that validates the safety and efficacy of such public good medicines converts the IP-NFTs into Hypercerts eligible to receive outcome payments from a crowdfunded Open Source Medical Prize Fund proportional to improved patient outcomes validated in clinical trials. The Impact Market also de-risks the funding of clinical trials for donors / public. The result would be that investors fund new public good medicines that are off-patent, unmonopolizable, and available to the entire global community at low cost, while obtaining a standard return on investment. 

However, in order to bring this open source business model to pharma, we need to crowdfund a source of retroactive (and quadratic) funding of the Impact Market through a Medical Prize Fund. Together,  the community can usher in a new era of medicine which does not ignore otherwise viable therapies because they are not profitable under the traditional patent system. Unlike donations to traditional charities (which often receive the majority of their funding from big pharma), through this novel “pay-for-success” mechanism, you can also be sure that your donations will only fund successful clinical trials.

Our current goal is to engage with healthcare payers to support the establishment of a Medical Prize Fund that can act as a source of retroactive public goods funding for open source medicines. 

