Some sort of joke? Martin Shkreli, the most hated man in America, comes out with a new crypto drug project

In May, Martin Shkreli, the odious Albanian-born American entrepreneur and investor who became notorious for speculating on the cost of drugs, was released from prison. And then he returned to his old ways (apparently, he decided to use the hype around his person). Shkreli became the “most hated man in America” and earned the nickname Pharma Bro after buying the rights to Daraprim, an antiparasitic drug used to treat an infection that occurs in some AIDS, malaria, and cancer patients. He raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a pill.

Shkreli’s new project, Druglike is decentralized science (DeSci) drug discovery Web3 platform intended to democratize the costs (sounds ironic, considering the founder’s past), access, and rewards of computational drug discovery.

“We started Druglike because, in our experience, traditional drug discovery software is too difficult and expensive to use. Druglike will remove barriers to early-stage drug discovery, increase innovation and allow a broader group of contributors to share the rewards. Underserved and underfunded communities, such as those focused on rare diseases or developing markets, will also benefit from access to these tools,” Pharma Bro says.

Why you probably may like Druglike

According to its website, Druglike is a free, decentralized computing network that provides resources for anyone who wants to start or contribute to early-stage drug discovery projects. Shortly, Druglike will release a web-based suite for target identification, drug development, and tools for creating and running large-scale virtual screening workflows

At the same time, Druglike’s founder boasted about the new consensus mechanism that would be used in the platform. Proof-of-Optimization will help solve computational chemistry problems at a competitive cost. Computing participants can run solver and checker nodes that provide industry-scale virtual screening campaigns. An official MSI platform token will be launched for these operations (by the end of this year).

In an exclusive interview with Milk Road, Pharma Bro said that the goal of Druglike is to make it easier for anyone to design and model chemical compounds. Special software licenses are expensive, and users must pay for the computing. Also, running models takes a lot of server power, so it’s costly to run (like mining bitcoin).

“Today — there is software to do this. If you’re a chemist at some big drug company, and you’re trying to design a new cancer drug, you’re using this software. (eg. Shrodinger). It is really expensive. Like companies pay $50k, $100K+ just to use this thing,” he mentioned.

So the project’s main objective is to take the expensive software and release a free version; instead of using centralized computing servers, create a computer network you can pay to use via a crypto token. So eventually, drugs are cheaper to buy for everyone, and every rare disease can be treated.

Druglike software will let anyone design a drug on their computer, whether a company worker, a college student, or just a kid who wants to try it at home.

“It takes a ton of computer power to run these models to build out the drug (not the actual drug, but the code and molecules behind it). The goal is to incentivize people to share their computing via Web3 models like tokenomics, etc.,” Shkreli said.

Crypto in science

It’s called DeSci because, like DeFiAn emerging financial technology based on secure distributed ledgers similar to those used by cryptocurrencies. is for finance, the DeSci is for decentralized science.

So Druglike’s team is tackling the drug design/modeling part, and they have DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations, a type of bottom-up entity structure with no central authority.) like:

• LabDAO — network of open dry/wet labs you can tap into;
• Molecule — Web3 marketplace for research-related IP;
• VitaDAO — collectively funds and digitizes research in the form of IP-NFTsNFTs may be subject to IP protection, including copyright, design patent, and trademark rights..

Well, the idea itself looks very cool, promising to make drug development easier and cheaper for scientists and enthusiasts alike. But Martin Shkreli’s past suggests some kind of crypto scam.