Quickstart
Last updated
Last updated
The ongoing global mental health crisis is estimated to cost the global economy $5 trillion per year and is forecasted to rise to $16 trillion per year by 2030. With psychiatric conditions being a leading cause of economic burden worldwide, the mental health crisis can be characterized as one of the world’s most severe and rapidly escalating problems.
Additionally, there is a crisis underway within the research and development (R&D) community for novel therapeutic candidates that can treat psychiatric conditions – particularly small-molecule drugs, which by nature, are convenient to administer, manufacture and distribute – with only a handful having been put on the market in the past ~ 20 years. Mechanistically novel therapeutics present the possibility of curbing the mental health crisis with greater precision and accuracy.
Despite the obvious shortcomings with currently marketed medicines coupled with high demand for new ones, larger pharmaceutical firms remain uninterested in supporting the needed R&D for novel psychiatric medicines. Presumably, this is due to the systemic difficulty and riskiness involved in the incumbent development process, especially at early-stages. Accordingly, a solution is urgently needed to de-risk development and align stakeholder interests, including patients, researchers, and industry, towards common incentives in solving these problems.
As a solution, we propose an open and decentralized organizational structure utilizing technological infrastructure based on blockchain to capitalize, govern, and incentivize an interdisciplinary group focused on R&D for psychiatric conditions in hopes of developing patient-centric medicines downstream.
A key reason for selecting this organizational framework is modularity, where the base layer acts as an open and decentralized information exchange while a collection of therapeutics development initiatives comprise an Elata-owned portfolio of individual programs that can be spun out, out-licensed, or commercialized through Joint Venture (JV) agreements.
The end-goal of Elata is to kickstart and augment therapeutics development across a range of psychiatric conditions where there is a high unmet medical need whilst adhering to open-source principles, contributor incentivization, and inevitably organizational continuity through royalties, partnerships, and productization.
