Reinvent the wheel with Web3, Drug Research Edition

Just a few months after his release from prison, Martin Shkreli returns to his entrepreneurial paths.

Shkreli announced on Monday that he will start a Web3 platform called Druglike. This is not a drug society Mind you-it is banished from the pharmaceutical industry-but an open source platform for drug research, according to a press release:

Druglike builds up a decentralized computer network that provides resources for everyone who wants to start or contribute to drug research projects in the early phase. In contrast to competitors, Druglike will be web -based and can be used completely free of charge. Druglike will shortly publish a web-based suite for target identification, drug design and tools for the structure and execution of extensive virtual screening workflows.

open source platforms for medical research already exist.

For example, a platform called Virtualflow was used for a publication in Nature from 2020, in which a team of scientists "one of the largest and freely available docking-Ready league libraries with more than 1.4 billion molecules prepared". A quick (and we hope not incorrectly) examination of the Internet helps us guess that ligands bind to proteins to target certain pharmaceutical therapies, and docking is a modeling technique to predict how ligands and proteins will bind.

The white paper refers to the nature experiment in the fat printed section:

other screens of similar size run on cloud-ready hardware and often use tens of thousands of CPU cores for several days at a time ... Local supercomputers are also used for the operation of large virtual screening pipelines. These large-scale screening projects either require special discount contracts with cloud computing providers or prioritized academic access to high performance computing (HPC) resources. Smaller research groups can run screens on standard cloud computing resources, but the profit margins to specialized hardware provided by the cloud usually limit the size of the screen.

Druglike uses ligand docking as an example in his white paper. What distinguishes from Virtualflow is what we can say that you add a bunch of web3 to the mixture, along with some decentralized computing. The white paper describes the ligand docking modeling as an optimization problem and says that the project creates a new protocol called "proof-of-optimization"-basically a proof-of work for functional optimization problems-for verification.

We will admit that we are not currently dealing with the data science skills in order to independently evaluate how realistic this proposal is.

But when it comes to decentralized computing, we have found a white paper reference to Folding@Home, a decentralized project in which normal people can donate computing power to support university laboratories in carrying out protein folding simulations.

FOLDING@HOME teams offer various “rewards” for participation, but there does not seem to be a standard for which rewards are used. In other words, realistically there could be no cryptocurrency participation at all. At the beginning of 2019, Folding@Home published a cryptocurrency guideline that says directly:

Given the recent discussions within the Folding@Home Community On our relationship with cryptocurrencies, we would like to use this opportunity to give an official explanation. Folding@Home currently does not support cryptocurrencies but we look forward to getting in touch with participants with a variety of motivations. Regardless of whether you are interested in healing diseases, expanding our understanding of how the world works, seeing who can build the fastest computer or earn cryptocurrency. There is a long story of participants in Folding@Home that develop third -party applications that improve the community, and we see cryptocurrencies falling in this category. Our guidelines are always dictated by science, which forms the basis of folding@home, but the maintenance of a consistency level that stimulates everyone to continue to participate in the project has a high priority.

In forums for new and interested volunteers, a contribution comes from October 2021 from a user who says that he has heard, "This thing is a Dogecoin miner at the same time", and asks: "How do I get Doge out and how do I step on a team?"

We also cannot help but to find the press release from Druglike a “Safe Harbor” declaration, only in the event that the tokens planned by the platform are regarded as securities. SHKRELI is of course also prohibited to act as a senior employee or director of public companies, so the white paper contains a disclaimer, which says, "If and when Druglike. An offer in the United States, the offer will probably only be available."