Solution
Last updated
Last updated
Elata aims to address areas of high unmet patient need and assemble a collective of experts around the given area to create new solutions. To achieve our goals, we consider the entire drug development pipeline from start to finish by utilizing novel and overlooked basic and applied science to then translating these findings into real-world solutions for patients.
Implementing an iterative approach combines the power of working directly with patient communities and alternative governance structures that can finance these innovations. Particularly, utilization of tokenization and therefore market-based economic mechanisms can deliver much needed incentives for greater participation and problem solving in this area.
Read on to learn more about the specifics of the solution we propose.
To go from ‘bench to bedside’, the preclinical steps include analyzing scientific research to identify and validate viable drug targets (proteins, receptors, genes, etc.), screening therapeutic candidates, validating/optimizing the lead candidate, testing, and then collecting enough data to enable an IND (Investigational New Drug Application) filing, which essentially grants regulatory approval to begin clinical trials (human testing).
Through the emergence of TechBio (IT-enabled biomedicine; engineerable biology), we believe that the bulk of issues once having plagued preclinical development, have seen greater improvement than that of the clinical process.
In psychiatry especially, the main issues revolve around clinical trial design and difficulty in late-stage research. Psychiatry, however, has struggled in both areas – in addition to clinical reproducibility issues, the basic research in this area is widely inconclusive, leaving scientists clueless during important translational steps (namely surrounding efficacy testing in animal models).
Luckily, especially in the past few years, the industry has seen a massive increase in the amount of research that will inevitably drive the understanding of multifaceted biological phenomena that cause these conditions to occur.
New basic research initiatives in psychiatry include the growth of the NIMH’s (National Institute of Mental Health) intramural research program, Massachusetts General Hospital’s (teaching hospital at Harvard) center for Precision Psychiatry, Columbia, Stanford, and others are working hard to grow the collective understanding of mental health disorders on a fundamental level.
A precision-first drug development model offers distinct advantages relative to a traditional psychiatric drug development model – it enables the pursuit of validated brain targets that can be linked to specific symptoms of mental health disorders, leading to more tailored and effective treatment options. Downstream, the clinical trials can be smaller, increasingly segmented (stratification and personalization), greater chance for reproducibility, and less cost-intensive.
Elata proposes a solution to the lack of treatments by bridging the gap – bringing research from bench to bedside – through working with this new influx of research and experimental medicine results from real-world patient communities to de-risk the process and ultimately develop medicines, which are more likely to reach the market.
Utilizing an organizational structure where the hub is a decentralized engine for drug development, we can bolster greater results, do so faster and hopefully, achieve greater downstream success. In executing our strategy where the hub is accompanied by individual research efforts, we aim to solve a systemic problem that the cryptocurrency community has been struggling with as well: when to incorporate centralized governance and when to incorporate decentralized governance.
As a hybrid model, initiatives will be voted on and passed through the hub (which is fully decentralized; there is no board of directors or CEO) and then subsequently passed along into smaller projects, where a qualified management team can then be elected through an on-chain voting process. From there, individual projects can be assigned a tokenized asset – in the form of an ERC-721 (NFT; Non-Fungible Token) and ERC-20 token – where the Sponsored Research Agreement (SRA) is assigned to and hosted by the on-chain asset. This provides individual projects to receive further funding for unique needs, liquidity, and ultimately market-based economic principles that deliver greater incentives to all stakeholders.
Using this framework, early-stage drug developers unlock the opportunity to advance their research in a way similar to exchange-traded Corporations, while circumventing bureaucratic measures that often get in the way of true innovation.
