Empowering medical researchers and patients by addressing the trillion dollar tragedy of the commons for unmonopolisable public goods medicines is the vision and mission driving the DeSci project Crowd Funded Cures (CFC).

In particular, there are 1000s of low-cost and potentially safe and effective therapies where the active ingredient is off-patent, therefore a monopoly price cannot be enforced e.g., new uses for off-patent / generic drugs, natural plant medicines, supplements/nutraceuticals, diets, and lifestyle interventions. Therefore, clinical trials validating the safety and efficacy of such unmonopolisable therapies are quintessential public goods, and there are no private incentives to fund clinical trials. CFC intends to use pay-for-success (PFS) contracts or flexible prizes (a form of retroactive public goods funding or on-chain social impact bond), which are backed by pharmaceutical payers on the basis of overall healthcare cost savings to solve this market failure as a scalable business model for open source medicine.

CFC was established as a NZ-registered charity by Savva Kerdemelidis, a commercial/IP/crypto/patent attorney in 2013, which has since grown to 10 volunteers. It has partnered with key members of the DeSci and open source community including VitaDAO and Molecule.to and the Open Source Pharma Foundation in 2021, and intends to launch as a DAO this year.

There is a high impact use case for Web3 to address this tragedy of the commons using pay-for-success (PFS) smart contracts and Public Good Medical Prize NFTs as bounties which incentivise investors to fund clinical trials for public good medicines via tradable IP-NFTs facilitating price discovery via market making/token bonding curves.

Rights to receive an outcome payment under an enforceable PFS contract will represent a new form of quasi-IP incentives for development of public goods.