Solving Humanity’s Greatest Macro-Challenges
The conventional model for accelerating scientific advancement is fundamentally inefficient. There are so many foundational medical problems just waiting for consumer-ready solutions.
Though we, as a society, fund trillions of dollars of capital/resource/time allocation into research/development, we often see very little progress. Entities spend billions of dollars on clinical trials but over 90% of them end in failure.
Many drug development programs are derailed by setbacks that are often unrelated to a drug’s mechanism of action or efficacy. These setbacks can include factors as diverse as a failure to maintain proper manufacturing protocols or even follow the FDA’s feedback precisely and on time. There are examples of trials that were delayed because required forms were filed late or incorrectly. — Chris Plaford, Founder and CEO, Claravant
Furthermore, governments and institutions are given the reigns to selectively determine priorities of the greater scientific community by representing the primary source of funding for research and discovery.
This problem breeds many incentive-structure issues across the numerous independent stakeholders. The result is significant misalignment between individual institutions, financial centers, universities, governments and others. There ends up being lots of duplicate and, at times, conflicting efforts. Thus, there is massive opportunity to increase collaborative efforts by making critical data more accessible across industries and organizations.
Nano Vision is pioneering a life-saving economic system that incentivizes the collection and use of molecular data globally. They leverage the blockchain, coupled with a new crypto-asset, to seamlessly share data and resources across borders. This platform and model has the potential to fundamentally change the way we address world health.
Their approach is anchored by the “Nano Sense™ platform, which includes a chip which is being developed in partnership with Arm, the world’s leading semiconductor IP company owned by SoftBank and the SoftBank Vision Fund. The chip will yield highly-secure, blockchain-protected molecular data that can be used for the recognition and analysis of health threats in real time.”
They have also partnered with numerous organizations, including National University of Singapore and Baylor College of Medicine, among others, to “converge the latest technology available and remove borders to allow professional and citizen scientists around the world to solve the grand challenges of human and environmental health through a sincere, transparent and purpose-driven system.”
Effectively, they have developed and scaled a new model for scientific advancement that is distributed and globalized in nature. Importantly, the Nano Token currency will serve as a bridge between institutions and governments to enhance communication speed and efficiency.
Their vision is comprised of four critical features:
1. The collection of real-time, research-based molecular data on a global scale
2. The collection of real-time, real-world data from trillions of chips and IoT devices
3. Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems to identify trends and draw conclusions, giving scientists an entirely new tool to create solutions
4. Inclusion of everyone on a global scale, from the sick or threatened to the research scientist or citizen scientist
The Nano Vision team’s goal is “to stand up a new economy leveraging our technology platform to enable near-term access to $100 billion worth of resources and data to start tackling the highest-impact $1 trillion segment of this high-cost market.”
It will be interesting to see how their team of experienced entrepreneurs, medical/technology professionals, and government leaders converge frontier technology with existing infrastructure to globalize their solution. If all pans out, this decentralized model has the potential to deliver significant impact to the medical and healthcare world.