pharmaceutical industry

Martin Shkreli—the notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive fresh from prison after his 2017 fraud conviction—announced his latest, eyebrow-raising venture this week: the creation of a blockchain-based Web3 drug discovery platform that traffics in his own cryptocurrency, MSI, aka Martin Shkreli Inu.The platform, still in the early development phase, is called Druglike, according to a press release that circulated on July 25. Its goals are ostensibly lofty, but the details are extremely sketchy, and Shkreli’s intentions have…

Insulin was first discovered in 1921, and the following year, a 14-year-old boy suffering from diabetes became the first person treated with it. The medical breakthrough won a Nobel Prize in 1923. The hormone was originally taken from the pancreas of cows and pigs, but in 1978 scientists figured out how to make a synthetic human version. It was the first drug made via genetic engineering. Since then, three companies have dominated the US insulin market: Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi.Manufacturing insulin is no small…

Martin Shkreli was arrested in New York City in 2015 for securities fraud.Image: Andrew Burton (Getty Images)If there’s one thing we can trust Martin Shkreli to do, it’s revolutionize the healthcare industry. The disgraced pharmaceutical executive is now behind a Web3 based drug discovery platformcalled Druglike, that seeks to increase the accessibility of drug discovery through decentralized computing.The pharmaceutical industry is a greedy industry that cashes in on vulnerable populations and is in desperate need of a…

On March 16, 2020, the first volunteer received a shot of Moderna’s then-experimental Covid-19 vaccine, just 63 days after the company had generated a genetic blueprint of the new virus. But Moderna’s rival beat it to the marketplace: Pfizer’s Covid vaccine would be authorized for use in the United States less than a year later, a record-breaking achievement. Previously, the fastest a vaccine had ever been developed was for mumps—which took about four years.The speed at which both companies were able to deliver their…