Open-Source Pharma Is Inevitable — Because the Patent System Is Failing Rare Diseases

There are ~7,000 rare diseases affecting 300 million people globally. <5% have approved treatments. Why? Because the patent-monopoly model requires a market large enough to recoup $1-2B development costs. Rare diseases don't have that market.

Open-source drug development — where compounds, data, and protocols are freely shared — eliminates the need for patent protection because there's no monopoly to protect. The Open Source Malaria and Open Source Tuberculosis consortia have demonstrated that this model produces drug candidates at a fraction of traditional cost.

Hypothesis: Open-source pharma will deliver approved treatments for >50 rare diseases that the traditional pharma model has ignored, by reducing development costs 10-100x through shared data, distributed clinical trials, and manufacturing-on-demand. The first major success will be a repurposed generic drug validated through an open-source clinical trial coordinated by a DAO.

Prediction: An open-source rare disease drug development program will bring a therapy from candidate identification to regulatory approval in <5 years at <$50M total cost by 2032.