How to Revitalize Science in Japan and Beyond?

Japan’s science enterprise has so much untapped potential. Yet recent trends show it is slipping behind global peers. In a 2023 review of science journals, Japan dropped to 13th place globally. Twenty years ago, Japan was number one in this same ranking. What happened?

• Funding in Japan continues to lag global peers.

• Hundreds of science projects have stopped in the early stages of the product development cycle. Many new products and therapies have not reached patients. Projects have perished in the “Valley of Death” between basic research and commercialization or clinical trials.

• Academic scientists only have patents or citations as a success metric for promotions, not commercialization of patents.

• Complex, lengthy, and costly legal processes serve as a daunting barrier to scientists wishing to own or commercialize their intellectual property (IP). Even if they have brilliant ideas, the legal process thwarts them.

• Academic scientists spend hours time in administrative meetings or teaching classes.

• Academic relationships with investors or company R&D units are not as vibrant as professor contacts wish they were.

• While European and U.S. scientists have joined global, decentralized science communities sprouting up via decentralized autonomous organizations, no Japan-based science team has yet joined.

Change is underway, however. A newfound emphasis on deep tech start-ups has energized science in Japan. PhD post doc researchers and students are now aiming to run their own deep tech venture, not go the traditional corporate route. And new platform has emerged to take advantage of this emphasis as well as global trends for digital science investment: Merito.

How Can Merito Revitalize the Science Ecosystem?

Merito enables scientists to plug into global networks. Merito simplifies science funding to reduce friction in taking a product from the lab to market. Scientists can use Merito to get funding from the internet instead of relying on in-person meetings or centralized institutions like government agencies. Japanese science funding can go from local to global on Merito.

Merito offers an online gateway for quick funding of Japanese applied research. Via Merito’s website, science and industry can connect, negotiate a Sponsored Research Agreement (SRA), sign the SRA once finalized, execute initial and milestone payments, and maintain SRA records.

Why can Merito boost the science enterprise?

Unlocking New Funding Sources

Insufficient deep tech and science-based start-up funding has remained a well-known challenge without a clear solution — until Merito came along.

Through Merito, science teams have a new way to get funded. They no longer have to tediously apply for public grants or depend on limited university research funding. Using Merito to get funded by companies and global funding groups, Japanese teams plug into scientific communities that can actively support them and engage with their research.

A Japanese scientist can use Merito as an alternative to taking many hours to apply for research grants. Scientists can use Merito to connect with company Open Innovation units (both in Japan and globally), medical foundations, and other internet-based investors for the exclusive right to license their research or offer equity in a future startup (as little as a 3% stake). Merito thus helps Japanese scientists overcome persistent challenges:

• Merito gives connections to global companies who could support “translating” their research from the university laboratory into clinical trials undertaken by a new start-up company.

• Merito provides Japanese professors a way to get an injection of funding to successfully translate the basic research into clinical trials.

• Merito nullifies geographic barriers that have disadvantaged non-Tokyo-based researchers.

• Merito lets scientists apply for funding regardless of their gender, academic affiliation, age, social connections, or national origin. Merito democratizes science so science can compete on its merits.

Starting soon, easy-to-view icons on Merito’s website will list promising biomedical projects for investors to assess. This saves investors time sorting through paper files at a Japanese university tech transfer offices — or worse, paying a translator to convert them to English and then needing to be sorted.

As a concrete example, cellular biologist professor Viktor Korolchuk of Newcastle University received $285,000 for his longevity research from an global biopharma investment group. Additionally, a research team at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark also received $250,000. These sums dwarf the common sponsorship amounts of $15,000-$25,000 in Japanese biopharma research.

One can expect Merito projects growing and eventually receiving investment from the later-stage venture capitalists supported by the Ministry of Trade, Economy, and Industry (METI)’s $2 billion program to boost biotech funding.

2) Scientific Communities Incentivized to Collaborate

When scientists use Merito for their research, they can get funded by those that are directly interested in their research area. Buyers come from across the world and form a supportive community around women’s reproductive health or neuroscience. Instead of being funded by generalists in a company or an investment fund, they instead connect to subject-matter experts, specialized investors, and even patient groups who have formed a decentralized autonomous organization to channel resources to one specific research area, like colon cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or hair loss research.

Global health communities can directly advance research their members deeply care about. Instead of a grant agency or a company, the funding source becomes a network of enthusiastic people who want to engage and learn about the researcher’s mission.

Medical associations can join these communities to more directly — and more efficiently — fund research of the causes that matter to them. For instance, the American Heart Association could fund a Japanese biotech company focused on cardiovascular research, medical philanthropists like the Medicines Patent Pool could fund neglected tropical disease research, and disease-specific associations could fund research in their target area.

Merito can bring a paradigm shift in health research funding, for it can shift from universities and toward specialized health funding communities.

3) Unlocking Universities’ Misalignment of Research and Teaching

Choosing internet-based funding on Merito instead of time-consuming grant applications, which fail over 80% of the time, researchers could gain precious time.

Being forced to teach classes and attend frequent administration meetings, scientists suboptimally use time. Professors struggle to manage these repeatable experiments when they have to go attend the biology department meeting or corral their teaching assistants to direct the next teaching phase for their undergrad students. Granted, some professors enjoy teaching yet they could well be in the minority.

What if we separated research and teaching?

• Undergrads in exceedingly large 400+ student classes would be grateful.

• Professors would be happy they didn’t have to teach when they’d rather be in their labs.

• Patients could get access to more therapies generated by researchers who were more focused on discovery, not writing the October midterm exam.

Win-win-win.

4) Unlocking Mindspace from Less Time Chasing Citations or Patents

Traditional science suffers from perverse incentives that use patents or citations as a success metric for academic promotions, thus prioritizing quantity over quality. So much effort gets wasted.

Were drug discovery to become easier, it could become a success metric for academic promotions as well. This could be more viable if Japanese scientists could get quick funding via Merito. They could more easily found spin-off drug discovery start-ups that generate new therapies in Japan.

In this new model, professors would have more time to develop life-saving therapies to reduce patient suffering. They would gain this time from wasting less time producing patents for promotion’s sake. This floods the patent market with low-quality patents which venture capitalists and other funding sources (such as pharma companies) find it difficult to sort through for valuable ideas. Patents are also written in Japanese, making it even more tough for global investors to fund brilliant-yet-difficult-to-find therapeutic ideas emerging from Japanese universities.

5) Saving Time: Faster Funding by making it easier TTOs

University technology transfer offices (TTOs) often have talented members yet are understaffed. Deals such as license agreements surrounding pre-patent and patent IP are complex and often need legal support, for which TTOs often do not have enough resources to efficiently handle. The long time to arrange these deals can deter inventors and IP thus stays stuck in labs.

By using Merito, sponsored research agreement deals can go faster, cost less, and give professors more ownership of their work given they begin to own it before an (expensive) patent gets approved.

Thus, accelerated research outcomes could take place. Since digital science ownership started in 2022, industry sources say it takes 1/3 as long to fund a research idea using digital science versus the traditional route of using paper IP contracts. Ideas can go faster from lab to clinical trials to patients.

6) Unlocking Decentralized (DAO) Investment

Drug discovery hunters from pharma giant Pfizer recently came across several scientists working on regenerative medicine cures to slow down the aging process. The scientists no longer wanted to sell their research to a pharma company. Instead, the scientists wanted to sell their intellectual property (IP) to VITA DAO, an internet-based biotech investment fund

To access this research, Pfizer representatives reportedly had to approach VITA for a partnership, as well as investing in the VITA organization to join the governance of this group formed as a “decentralized autonomous organization” (DAO).

DAOs organize talent, communities, and capital around a scientific mission. DAOs use blockchains to vote on decisions and also use tokens to grant governance stakes in the organization.

Science DAOs are organized around a specific biotechnology focus, such as longevity, women’s reproductive health, or biomanufacturing. DAOs incentivize many people toward the same goal of advancing its IP assets. A DAO can attract resources to a favored health area. HairDAO brings funding toward hair preservation research, for example. An earlier post explains DAOs and IP-NFTs in greater detail.

Merito is serving as Japan’s only portal for science to access funds from DAOs.

7) Merito Empowering OpenLabs

Historically, most deep scientific research has come out of universities. Most scientists have no choice but to enter a university as a professor. They need its funding, facilities, and support network. Yet this traditional route to drug discovery has not led to almost any biotech unicorns in Japan.

OpenLabs offer an exciting alternative. Just as knowledge workers began to eschew commercial office buildings for co-working spaces, scientists are doing the same at OpenLabs. OpenLabs are move-in ready for scientists. They offer benches and stools, advanced “wet lab” equipment, hazardous waste pickup, emergency showers, chemical fume hoods, and biosafety cabinets.

Most importantly, by being located in thriving downtown areas, OpenLabs offer exposure to investors or corporate partners that university-only scientists often lack because of their physical isolation deep inside a campus. At MBC Biolabs’ OpenLab urban facility adjacent to the University of San Francisco, a scientists will run into investors and deep tech startup entrepreneurs while walking to get coffee.

The U.S. company BioLabs began this trend starting in Boston, then expanding to Germany, France, and other U.S. locations. The Cambridge Innovation Center also provides lab co-working spaces in the United States and soon, Japan. Other companies — and venture capitalists — offer other laboratory co-working spaces.

By using Merito, independent Japanese scientists can research in OpenLabs. Already, BioLabs have opened in Kawasaki and Tsukuba, and in 2025 a new large, OpenLab run by the Fukuoka Jisho company will open in Fukuoka.

Merito Ushers in a New Era of Science in Japan

With Merito, Japanese applied science can access a higher level.

Both scientists and universities will evolve, and those who embrace Merito could get more research funds to their professors. Scientists thus can focus on research.

More optimism for science is on the way. Stay tuned.