CliNFTs

For a drug to be approved for commercial use, it needs to go through clinical trials and be approved by regulatory agencies. While most investigational drug products fail during clinical trials and never make it to the market, the ones that do make a ton of money for pharmaceutical companies. For instance, in 2019, AbbVie's blockbuster drug Humira generated $14.9 billion in sales. Clinical trials are the most critical parts of drug development, and they require participants to test drug efficacy. Right now, study participants don't stand to benefit from commercial drug sales. CliNFTs wants to change that. We've built a platform for pharma/biotech to mint NFTs for clinical trial participants. These NFTs serve as proof of participation in a study. If and when a drug starts generating revenue, the NFT serves as a vehicle for royalty payments -- pharma can allocate a percentage of their commercial drug revenue to the clinical trial participants, thereby benefiting those who took the risk of taking an experimental drug to bring a new medicine to the larger public.

CliNFTs is a full-stack MERN application. We leveraged MongoDB in this proof-of-concept (with the idea that post-hackathon, we can move a lot of the data on-chain!) so we could easily validate certain data elements prior to interacting with the blockchain. We used ethers.js and MetaMask to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. We also leveraged IPFS and Filecoin by using NFT.storage to save our NFT data off-chain in conjunction with minting the NFTs. NFT.storage is fantastic because it easily lets anyone look at the data we're saving in our NFTs via IPFS. Our smart contract for minting ERC721 tokens originates from OpenZeppelin and was deployed using Remix IDE. Our smart contract for sending royalty payments to study participants was made entirely with Ethers.js. Given that 2/3 of our team consists of recent bootcamp graduates, we're vproud that we could build a full-stack app that actively interacts with the blockchain.