Today we’re excited to announce Molecule’s IP-NFT funding paradigm has crossed the ocean to support age-related oral health research at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Ethan Perlstein, a well-known biotech founder and rare diseases advocate recently posted on Twitter that: "once you get a taste of decentralized biotech "it’s hard to go back to the centralized carnival of yore." It's as though he was talking about decentralized science (DeSci) itself. No event gave you this feeling better than the recent DeSci.Berlin gathering.

Paul Kohlhaas visited the Podcast of Andrew Steinwald, and spoke about his path into the pharmaceutical space and web3. He shares his experiences in biohacking, the pharma industry, the drug development process and how web3 could play a crucial role in making drug development more efficient, fair and transparent. This is achieved through BioDAOs an open source approach of pharmaceutical early stage research and leveraging the traits of NFTs through and a new standard, the IP-NFT. Molecule is a company that is virtualizing and decentralizing how drug development works. They do this by attaching data and IP rights to non-fungible tokens (NFT's) and then bringing the core IP into web3. This makes the intellectual property liquid, which is very hard to achieve in biotech today, and also enables price discovery around IP. Molecule has created a curation market where people can trade and discover therapeutics for drugs. Molecule has also started building biotech DAOs, which are research collectives that are comprised of patients, investors, and researchers in a specific therapeutic area. The mission is to democratize access to medicine by empowering researchers and patients to become co-owners of the IP and data associated with a new therapeutic. Paul describes how the company's IP-NFTs work to store data associated with a new therapeutic and how they can be used to fractionalize ownership of the IP. He also walks through the company's roadmap and explains how they plan to decentralize ownership of the data and IP associated with a new therapeutic. Paul discusses the origins of VitaDAO and IP-NFT, the process of setting up a DAO, and the long-term vision for a DAO-based ecosystem for pharmaceutical research and development.The grand vision for the projects is to develop a drug that is enabled and discovered through the process and reaches patients in a eight to ten year timeframe. He also discusses the potential for IP-NFTs to be used to fractionalize the ownership of IP and allow patients to contribute funding to research."