“Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli launches new crypto-medicine discovery business

“Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, the former pharmaceutical executive best known for raising the price of a life-saving drug by 4,000% and then going to jail, is starting a new business.

He plans to debut a software platform called Druglike that provides resources to individuals or organizations that “want to start or contribute to early-stage drug discovery projects.” The company’s goal is to “democratize the access, costs and rewards of early-stage drug discovery,” according to the company’s Twitter profile.

Drug discovery and development takes a lot of time and money, and requires approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On average, the process from identifying a drug to its FDA approval can take 10 years and cost $1.3 billion, Druglike said.

Druglike, announced publicly on Monday, plans to offer a cloud-based, decentralized service that offers “in silico” computing programs to identify and design drugs — the same software used by big pharmaceutical firms. It will also include a blockchain verification system where contributors can earn rewards paid out in a new cryptocurrency called Martin Shkreli Inu (MSI).

Through the platform, anyone with internet access can discover “the next breakthrough [in] medicine, Shkreli said in a statement. “A broad pool of innovators and contributors, rather than just pharmaceutical giants, [could] profit on drug discovery,” he added.

“It’s kind of like my revenge on the pharmaceutical industry to some extent. It would be fascinating then, the next big medicine came out because… 20,000 computers with volunteers did it instead of [say]Merck,” he said Daily mail.

In January, a federal judge slapped Shkreli with a lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry. It is unclear whether his new project violates this ban, although Druglike states that it is “not a pharmaceutical company” nor engaged in drug development. Nevertheless, two attorneys general are already investigating Druglike, according to The Daily Beast. A spokesperson for North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein told the publication that his office was “concerned about this development and will look into it.” The New York state attorney general is also looking into Shkreli’s new venture.

In 2015, when Shkreli was CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, he raised the price of Daraprim — a drug that treats a specific parasitic infection that is especially threatening to people with compromised immune systems, such as those with HIV/AIDS — to $750 from $13.50 per tablet. The move sparked widespread condemnation. He denied that the price increase was excessive and said so CBS at the time that he was simply “a capitalist. I’m trying to create … a profitable pharmaceutical company.”

But by 2018, a federal court sentenced Shkreli to seven years in prison after finding him guilty of three counts of securities fraud. Shkreli was accused of swindling investors out of millions of dollars they gave to his two hedge funds, then swindling cash and stock from another biotech company he founded to repay those investors. He was released from prison in May.