Impact Markets for Public Good Medicines using Pay-For-Success Contracts - Savva Kerdemelidis
Channel: Protocol Labs
Date: 2022-10-07

Bio:
Savva Kerdemelidis is a commercial / IP legal counsel with 18+ years experience and a New Zealand and Australian patent attorney with an LLM in IP law and postgrad BSc in Animal Physiology from the University of Canterbury (NZ) and advises various DeSci projects including VitaDAO, PsyDAO, and Molecule. He conducted his Masters thesis on alternatives to the patent system to incentivise development of medicines and founded the New Zealand charity Crowd Funded Cures in 2013 to help implement and scale these ideas as a social enterprise and DeSci project. Crowd Funded Cures' mission is to use financially innovative Pay-For-Success contracts or Social Impact Bonds, Medical Impact NFTs, IP-NFTs, and Hypercerts to create an Impact Market for clinical trial data validating the safety and efficacy of unmonopolisable public good medical therapies.
 
Abstract:
The lack of private financial incentives to develop public good medicines where a monopoly price cannot be enforced with patents (e.g. repurposing off-patent generic drugs and nutraceuticals, plant medicines, psychedelics, diets, and lifestyle interventions) results in a tragedy of the commons. This underinvestment in otherwise viable medical therapies for health stakeholders could create billions of dollars in health impact and cost savings for a relatively low cost per Quality-Adjusted-Life-Year (QALY) versus reliance on patent incentives and monopoly pricing (e.g. determining the optimal treatment protocol of generic ketamine to treat depression, generic fluvoxamine to treat Covid, generic rapamycin to improve healthy lifespan, or ketogenic diet to treat cancer).
 
An Impact Market for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) conducted by independent contract research organisations (CROs) validating the safety and efficacy of such unmonopolisable public good medicines can be implemented using a Flexible Medical Prize fund or Pay-For-Success smart contract as a source of retroactive funding and IP-NFTs that convert to Hypercerts (having a number of impact points linked to the percentage improvement in clinical outcomes in RCTs versus usual care) as a source of prospective funding. Market equilibrium to determine the appropriate reward for impact is automatically reached if a fixed annual amount is paid from the Medical Prize fund to Hypercerts owners proportional to their impact points for a predetermined period of time (e.g. 5 years). This price-finding mechanism for health impact (which is similar to the Health Impact Fund) is scalable, rewards both incremental improvements and scientific breakthroughs and can be used to create an Impact Market for any public good that can be reliably measured.

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