Epochal decided to join hands with numerous investors, such as Martin J. Lippert, the former executive deputy CEO of its new strategic partner, Metlife, to jointly establish the ECC Foundation. This was done on the grounds of promoting the global development of regenerative medicine, on top of the backing and suggestions from Charles Nicholson, the founder/CEO of Epochal himself. To do so, the investors will splash up to USD 3 million combined, while Epochal will contribute with USD 2 million worth of initial start-up fund.
As Singapore's first institutional foundation in the crypto ecosystem, the ECC Foundation is expected to become a platform for collaboration, decision-making and information sharing in the ECC community, with an initial value of over USD 5 million at its conception. According to Mr. Nicholson, "The ECC Foundation aims to facilitate the growth of regenerative medicine globally, build an ecosystem centered on cryptocurrency circulation, as well as provide subsidies, sponsorships and key infrastructure support to parties involved and supportive to the cause of the Foundation's ecosystem”. “This will be a key step in the Foundation's pursuit of its overall globalization strategy for regenerative medicine, as much as it is an effort to harness blockchain’s power to push the treatments and therapies of regenerative medicine onto the level playing field globally", he added.
Regenerative medicine is a medicinal branch that realizes healing through cellular manipulation — a true marvel of an early-21st-century discovery and even more so a research discipline touted to be most promising in the realm of modern medicine. Despite the hope of taking over traditional therapies, media hype on stem cells and high patient expectations have given birth to a number of unregulated stem cell clinics, offering methods that feature unclear therapeutic characteristics and have not been professionally tested, providing very little information on safety and efficacy. The global spread of these unverified stem cell therapies hints at a major gap in systemic information exchange for regenerative medicine globally, which could threaten the health of tens of thousands of patients. In view of this, the Foundation attempts to provide patients with reliable, efficacious, and experimentally-verified regenerative interventions, based on which a global regenerative medicine information exchange platform can be built to facilitate patients' access to relevant information.
Apart from the lack of trustworthy sources, the development of regenerative medicine is also highly uneven across the globe. Some countries, especially the major economies, not only pass and promulgate new medical laws but also develop medical technologies ahead of others, giving their people the much-coveted luxury of better therapeutic environments and cell therapies. Moreover, differing national monetary policies also hinder the development of regenerative medicine globally, depriving most patients of the chance for access.
The ECC Foundation remains committed to contributing to regenerative medicine treatments on a global scale as much as it does to promoting stem cell therapy to help more patients recover. All parties involved and supportive of regenerative medicine will be financially aided to scale up the Foundation's ecosystem and realize the application value of blockchain in regenerative medicine.