Martin Shkreli was released from federal prison in May after serving four years of a seven-year sentence for securities fraud. As the result of a separate federal lawsuit, a judge banned him for life from the pharmaceutical industry — an industry that made him both rich and infamous after he raised the price of a drug used by AIDS patients by 5,000%.
Now Shkreli is starting his second act. He's not launching not a drug company, he says, but a drug discovery software company with Web3 elements like cryptocurrency transactions and decentralized networks.
Druglike has raised $3 million in funding from undisclosed donors, and is making it very clear it is not a pharma company with launch day press release stipulating, "Druglike is a blockchain/Web3 software company and not a pharmaceutical company."
"A software company is a company that makes code with bytes and bits and variables and Github, and a drug company is something entirely different," Shkreli told me over the phone. "A drug company is a company that makes medicine, which according to my judges is something that requires an IND or an NDA filing.
"The judge's order also doesn't cover anything other than the United States, so I'm free to start a drug company in Switzerland — I actually have started drug companies in Switzerland before — or in China or in South America or wherever."
Shkreli's former company, Vyera Pharmaceuticals, at the heart of the federal lawsuit that got him banned from the pharmaceuticals industry, was incorporated in Switzerland with offices in New York.
His not-a-pharmaceutical company is part of a broader trend of Web3 developers entering the biopharma space and operates an almost-free-to-use, web-based drug discovery platform, currently available as a demo. Instead of paying a licensing fee to use the software, users pay for only the cloud computing power necessary to run the program, which can screen millions of compounds to see which best fits in a certain protein or receptor, a process that can be very intensive. This compute can only be purchased in the cryptocurrencies ethereum, the stable coin USDC or Druglike's proprietary coin MSI, an acronym for Martin Shkreli Inu.
The company is also working on building a distributed network of individuals trading compute that anyone can participate in, similar to bitcoin mining, although currently Druglike is powered through AWS.
Shkreli says he came up with the idea after learning a factoid claiming that the total computing power of all the computers running bitcoin is more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer.
"I thought, 'Well, what would I do with all that computing power?'" Shkreli said. "I'd probably throw it into some of the tools that I know and see if I can discover some new medicines, because that seems to be the most benevolent and exciting and personally important thing you can do is make medicine."
Despite the federal ban, Shkreli is still committed to the pharmaceutical industry and looking to find a way back in.
"My expertise and my life has been pharmaceuticals, and we are appealing the judge's order and our lawyers predict that the irrational order will be dismissed by the appeals court," he said. "This was a demonstrably illegal ruling by a district court judge that was so out of bounds with constitutionality that you cannot restrict somebody from their chosen vocation, that's just not possible."
The appeals case is currently ongoing in the Southern District of New York. He and his company Vyera Pharmaceuticals were sued by the FTC for their actions to protect its monopoly on the drug Daraprim and he was personally ordered to pay $64 million along with the ban.
"To the extent I have regrets about anything, it's giving the pharma industry a bad name, and sort of further hurting, it's already pretty bad reputation," Shrkeli said. "It's, like me, a mostly misunderstood industry that at its core is about getting people better through the miracle of science and the hard work of founders and entrepreneurs and scientists.
"It ends up getting maligned and trashed through different black eyes like mine, or Purdue or whatever — people remember those, but they don't remember the vertexes and the mRNA vaccines."
