A new model
for global
public health
Welcome to DALYA, a distributed drug development cooperative. We apply cutting edge methods of drug development, and novel DeFi funding mechanisms, to address diseases neglected by the pharma industry – to serve the billions of people whose health needs are not being met by the current system.
“Neglected diseases”, understood broadly as diseases affecting populations in low-income countries, are a leading cause of global mortality, chronic disability, and poverty. And yet, the pharma industry has neglected these for decades, with the result that the health needs of literally billions of people are not being met.
The “Disability Adjusted Life Year” (DALY) is a single measure to quantify the burden of disease – both from years of life lost due to premature death and years lived with disability. One DALY equals one lost year of healthy life.
1 in 5 DALYS lost annually to disease worldwide are due to diseases with almost no impact in high-income countries
DALY rates are 2,147% higher for infectious diseases among the poorest billion people, compared to high-income regions
Only 1% of drugs entering any phase of clinical development (from 1995-2019) targeted a disease on the WHO list of neglected tropical diseases - which affect nearly 2 billion people annually
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes people’s right to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits”
But this vision is not being realized in the area of drug discovery
Welcome to DALYA
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While the pharmaceutical industry does an impressive job of developing drugs which address the health needs of high-income countries, it does an extremely poor job of serving the needs of low-income countries. The degree of the mismatch is staggering: by way of illustration, among the set of all drugs in any phase of clinical development from 1995 to 2019 only 1% target any disease on the WHO list of neglected tropical diseases, conditions which affect nearly 2 billion people annually. The reasons for this are rooted in the fundamental economics of the pharmaceutical industry.
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Neglected Diseases aren’t scientifically intractable, they are economically intractable. Part of the reason is that the cost of drug development has been extremely high, greater than $1B per new drug. But a new generation of tools is rapidly changing that, dramatically lowering the threshold of economic viability.
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At DALYA, “our currency is time”. We’ll shortly introduce a novel token economy based on the health impact of our activities – e.g. a token model based on the premise that a year of healthy-life has value, and which values the our drug portfolio on the basis of DALYs-averted (rather than revenues)
