Biotech patents are the new CryptoPunks
NFTs for intellectual property + new science institutions - *chef's kiss*
This week the team at Molecule launched the first IP-NFT. This IP-NFT is a biomedical research project and piece of intellectual property from the University of Copenhagen, funded and packaged as a NFT, and its ownership was transferred to a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called VitaDAO.
Also in the last couple of months we have seen several new institutions for science announced, including Arcadia, an independent research organization focused on non-model organisms, and New Science, a summer fellowship for early career scientists in an independent research lab.
These developments represent new tools for translation of science, and combined, have an opportunity to completely reshape the way we do deeptech R&D. In particular they can solve the two areas where academia is most broken: funding and translation.
In academia, areas of research focus are dictated by funding / grant giving agencies, with little autonomy give to individual researchers to explore and determine their own areas of investigation. This is particularly bad in cross disciplinary fields, where there are unlikely to be clear grant solicitations, thereby stymying research into new areas. Furthermore “publish or perish” remains the word of the day, with publication in high impact journals outweighing nearly all other metrics of success.
Translation / tech transfer is broken too: there is no standard from one academic institution to the next. Each tech transfer office has a unique culture and set of quirks that make navigating the licensing process extremely difficult for outside parties. This lack of standardization is a killer - it’s impossible to evaluate an “index” or “dealflow” of IP, because with any piece of IP there is the X factor of institutional culture.
Independent research institutions have an opportunity to reshape both these issues, and IP-NFT should be explored as a way to do so.
IP-NFT can help solve both funding and translation issues - by subverting institutional culture / inertia, and opening the market for IP ownership. The Molecule project is just the first milestone - still a “toy” use case in the jargon of Chris Dixon, but it is decidedly less toy-like than a CryptoPunk or Pet Rock. New independent research organizations may be the first place they find broad utility.
The next phase of evolution will see the birth of DAO based research orgs, made up of visionary scientists and researchers, fully funded by IP-NFT, with license to discover things beyond our wildest dreams.
IP out of an academic institution is automatically owned by the institution. So IP-NFP will do close to nothing to academic institutions and solve probably non of its fundamental problems.
I fail to see how transaction technology / blockchain / IP-NFTs will do anything but obfuscate IP ownership and funding. I think the real advancement in biotech research will be in the creation of more Indie Research institutions who in turn fund more indie researchers unencumbered by the bureaucracy and antiquated grant-based funding model. _Maybe_ NFTs help facilitate that but the technology responsible for managing the transaction isn't the road block here - it's getting indie research to be accepted, funded and supported from inception to business launch that will change the game.