Abstract

Abstract

The ongoing global mental health crisis is estimated to cost the global economy ~ $4 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, with only a handful having been put on the market in the past ~ 20 years. This is remarkable because mechanistically novel therapeutics present the possibility of curbing the mental health crisis with greater precision.

Despite the obvious shortcomings with marketed medicines coupled with high demand and profitability of new ones, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries remain uninterested in supporting needed R&D for novel psychiatric medicines. Psychiatry is a unique field within medicine in that prescriptions are written based solely on clinician-observed symptom clusters, yet the healthcare industry has struggled to develop a replacement biomarker system which can replace incumbent diagnostic methodologies and therefore de-risk drug development as well as accurately predict treatment response.

This bottleneck is caused by a host of issues, but most importantly, is caused by the lack of accessibility and high cost of data collection, data privacy concerns, and small sample sizes in studies, which is due to an underlying lack of consenting patients. The combination of these factors has indirectly created an environment where existing datasets are thoroughly unreliable, and therefore cannot be used for as biomarkers.

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 engage, govern, and incentivize the commons to collectively build a more effective system in psychiatry.

The reason for selecting this organizational framework is to address key issues surrounding data collection, transparency and ownership, scalability, and commons-based innovation financing. The vision of Elata is to enable a modular org structure which acts as an open and decentralized information exchange comprised of a broad collection of open-source project initiatives owned by the Elata community. Successful efforts can then be commercialized, out-licensed, or spun-off according to the will of the Elata community through the native governance token, ELTA.