The Narrative
Sunshine was barely peeking through the clouds as people started walking into the impressive Francis Crick institute, where everyone could feel a special kind of energy bouncing around the scientists and passionate community builders. The Sunday morning chatter of scientific research innovation echoed across the halls of the inaugural DeSci.London event, which occurred on January 15-16, 2023 in London’s Kings Cross neighborhood.
In addition to dozens of presentations by DeSci founders and community leaders, the conference also featured a wide variety of breakout sessions, workshops, networking opportunities and panel discussions on topics such as decentralized peer review, opportunities for improving women’s health research, and decentralized AI to accelerate research. Attendees were able to learn about the latest advances in these fields and network with other scientists, researchers, founders, and investors from around the world.
Evening Activities
Vibe Bio and AWS each sponsored lively after-party events where people had the chance to connect over their shared passions for solving tough problems in traditional science. Low-ego scientists shared their stories from the lab and compared their journeys into DeSci. It was clear the people in this space have a shared vision of the future.
Day One Vibes
Alok Tayi, PhD, founder of Vibe Bio, kicked off the event with a keynote presentation on the emergence of the entrepreneurial scientist and the specific opportunities that Web3 offers to empower rare disease patient communities. He also shared a new approach to drug development funding that can help many biotech startups build a bridge over the infamous and metaphorical “Valley of Death”, a term used to describe the difficulty and risk of transitioning a new drug from pre-clinical development to clinical human trials. Most traditional investors simply cannot stomach the risk involved with many of these early stage biotechs. Alok explained how risk tolerant parties - primarily Web3 natives with a self-interest in accelerating the availability of effective disease treatments - could be community investors in these novel therapies.
He also described Vibe Bio’s global collective of patients, scientists, and partners who aim to enable superior collaboration strategies and resources for biotech startups. Alok ended with an invitation to join the next day’s workshop on Operationalizing a Rare Disease Cure Roadmap and gave a shout out to the Vibe Bio community. His keynote set the stage with a purpose for why we are all striving to make DeSci a reality - it’s all about making the world a better place for everyone.
Following Alok, Bianca Trovo’s presentation shared the issues related to contemporary pre-publishing peer-review and how it is a relatively recent workflow adopted by journals more broadly in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. Earlier in history, journals claimed to have peer-review processes, but it was predominantly the elite journal editors approving or rejecting the work of researchers.
The topic of decentralized peer review was frequently discussed in many talks and panels, emphasizing the frustration of the current slow peer review system and the importance of building solutions that can improve the reliability, integrity, and transparency of scientific data. The data reproducibility crisis in science is approaching an inflection point where the scientific community needs a solution before we completely lose the public trust in science.
That morning, in the seminar room, Joshua Bate, founder of DeSci World gave an introduction about DeSci for attendees who are newer to the space.
Martin Karlsson, founder of Lateral.io, shared his company’s work on creating a more user-friendly design for organizing and finding research papers, as well as creating reward incentives to encourage collaboration.
We heard about the concepts of Patient DAOs from Andre Chagwedera, founder of Fleming Protocol, which is aiming to tap into the health data economy, a new driving force behind biomedical research through patient communities.
Laura Minquini, founder of AthenaDAO, a women’s reproductive health research focused community, shared her perspectives on the lack of adequate research for perimenopause, endometriosis, and other female-related health conditions. She then led a fascinating panel with Dr. Maria Marinova and Dr. Julija Juric on the opportunities and barriers for improving women’s health research leveraging the DeSci community.
Michael Fischer, PhD, founder of DBDAO, shared how he built an infrastructure solution that allows scientists to turn their data into NFTs. Later on, he shared his hackathon demo with the audience using data collected from a classic baking soda and vinegar volcano experiment that you may have done in grade school. That was a fun crowd-pleaser.
The auditorium was full when Vincent Weisser, who is heavily involved in bringing to life DeSci organizations such as Molecule and VitaDAO, shared his podcast interview with Vitalik Buterin.
Decentralized Compute-Over-Data (#CoD) was a concept that was shared by Iryna Tsimashenka, Head of Developer Relations at Bacalhau and Protocol Labs. It uses distributed computing resources or nodes to process data in a decentralized manner, rather than relying on a centralized server or system. allows for greater scalability, security, and resiliency, as data can be processed by multiple nodes simultaneously. The Ireland-based Algovera team, Richard Blythmn, Hitesh Shaji, and Jakub Smekal, were at the event and shared their latest updates on the decentralized AI stack and how applications can be designed effectively for researchers.
Day Two Highlights
JOGL’s co-founder and president, Thomas Landrain, presented his Paris-based open research and innovation platform that allows scientist communities to receive microgrants (typically €5000 every few months) to advance their research. He shared JOGL’s design on community peer-review that is more transparent, fast, scalable, and fair.
Laurence Ion, dealflow steward at VitaDAO, shared updates on the research community’s progress on democratizing funding for longevity research and the concept of DAOs being a network state (referencing Balaji’s The Network State).
A panel on Ethics in DeSci, moderated by Joshua Bate (DeSci World), brought to light some of the challenges when radically changing the status quo in research and IP ownership, as well as the risks involved in automating processes with blockchain and AI.
The discussion inspired attendees to participate in an Ethics Workshop facilitated by Esther Jaromitski, PhD (human rights advocate) and Joshua Bate. I had the opportunity to participate and enjoyed being able to break down specific ethical issues involved in the workshop’s scenario prompts with my group. We addressed wealth inequality, data privacy, and safety failure accountability topics that are apparent in an IoT platform that can pay you to collect all your data.
Julia Hawkins, general partner at LocalGlobe and Latitude, led a DeSci bulls and bears panel on venture capital perspectives with Laura Modiano (AWS), Lina Zakarauskaite (Stride.VC), Max Mundt (Amino Collective), and Sean Yu (Backed VC).
Holke Brammer (Protocol Labs) presented his talk on hypercerts (semi-fungible token building on ERC-1155), which are a tool to build scalable retrospective funding systems for impact. Data fields captured in a hypercert include: set of contributors, scope of work, time of work, scope of impact, time of impact, and ownership rights. He described how hypercerts can expedite the de-risking of impact funding, catalyze investment in high-potential public goods, and offer recurring income streams to researchers. The release of the protocol is expected on February 1st and pilot announcement coming soon.
A panel discussion on decentralized intellectual property was moderated by Colin McCall (partner at TaylorWessing), and joined by Sara Holland, Amy Nick, and Veronique Birault, and Chris Byrnes (Molecule). They questioned the existing drug development research ecosystem and shared examples of potentially new ways to manage and track patents in the future. They also discussed ideas on how to regulate IP law across different jurisdictions with IP-NFTs.
Vibe Bio Workshop
A workshop discussion was hosted by Vibe Bio, where we focused on helping participants envision strategy roadmaps to speed up the discovery and commercialization of rare disease cures. In addition to Alok, speakers included Julia Hawkins, Oli Rayner, Ethan Perlstein, and Catriona Crombie. From the workshop, one shared objective that everyone agreed would be extremely valuable was for patient advocacy groups to register rare disease patients in patient tissue biobank and/or digital registry. This can enable data sharing opportunities for retrospective analysis. They also discussed issues around commercially viable research areas and shared common roadblocks in developing rare disease drugs.
Christopher Hill, co-founder of DeSci Labs, delivered an inspiring presentation on improving the verifiability, reproducibility, and compatibility of scientific research papers using IPLD. He defined decentralized research objects as [PIDs (persistent identifiers) + Data + Metadata + Methods] to create a common data pool that is open-read and open-write. He emphasized the importance of easy and super friendly UX designs that can integrate the tools scientists use everyday that can enable an open-state ecosystem. He demoed a new way to view research paper PDFs that is enriched with data tools, version histories, and collaboration features. The team is preparing for a beta launch of their platform soon.
DeSci can redefine how scientists perceive the h-index, which measures the productivity and citation impact of research publications. Compensating researchers for negative or failed experiments, as well as simple validation experiments, can encourage better collaboration among science communities, rather than trying to compete with other labs in the same focus area. The importance of compossibility (ability for multiple data systems to co-exist harmoniously) was another major theme of the DeSci London conference.
To conclude the conference’s final presentation, Niklas Rindtorff, founder of LabDAO, shared updates from LabDAO and described quadratic funding mechanisms that can revolutionize funding research, one of the toughest problems many young researchers currently face.
At the end of this talk, he shared a slide with photos of the many contributing LabDAO community leaders. The amazing thing about the DeSci movement is that cross-functional collaboration, as well as cross-DAO or cross-organization work, is so common among various DAO-primed communities.
Organizations are naturally cooperative and seeking to grow everyone’s pie (and not the mutton pie you may often find in England) - nothing against mutton pie. But the point is, DAOs create highly matrixed organizations with the added benefit of appropriately incentivized coordination strategies.
Takeaways on DeSci
Decentralized Science communities are exploring and evaluating infrastructure problems across all domains of research. Challenging the operational dogmas within traditional science is a common theme at DeSci London.
It is still early days for DeSci as many proposed operational models are still exploring their product/market/community fit. These organizations are tirelessly working to unlock value that’s been hidden in our existing socio-economic systems by giving the community more autonomy and power.
Patients, scientists, and investors are all very excited by the prospects of DeSci applications and designing new incentives to create sustainable alignment amongst the multiple stakeholders involved in producing good science.
Community Appreciation
A huge congratulations goes to Alfred Brown, Dr. Bharat Harbham, Sarah Hamburg and the entire organizing team who started this grassroots-led event about 6 months ago. This team has started something special that has the potential to grow year after year as the industry gains traction and reaches greater awareness among researchers. If you are local to London, look out for monthly meetups from the organizers.
This article captures only a sliver of the ideas and knowledge shared at the event.
The full agenda of the event can be found here.
Don’t miss a recap from the organizers on DeSci Collective’s Twitter space, planned for January 26, 2pm CET.
Thank you to all the sponsors, speakers, participants, staff, and community leaders at the event. Feel free to share your comments.