Tech Company Pledges Up to $200K from Cryptocurrency Sale to Support CMT Disease Research

True Reply recently committed to donating up to $200,000 from its cryptocurrency sale to support the Hereditary Neuropathy Foundation (HNF) and the Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease community.

The donation is part of an ongoing collaboration between the tech startup and the nonprofit foundation aimed at enhancing patient-focused research,  improving clinical trial design and patient recruitment, and finding out what matters most to patients living with CMT.

True Reply has pledged to donate $10 for every Ether raised through its current token sale for a total of up to $200,000. Ether cryptocoins (or tokens) are made by Ethereum, a blockchain platform.

“True Reply is supporting these efforts as we are dedicated to improving the lives of patients suffering from CMT,” Jose Cotto, founder and CEO of True Reply, said in a press release. “To date, we have utilized our technology in capturing the power of the CMT voice. After hearing countless testimonies from CMT patients from living with chronic pain and despair, we look forward to furthering knowledge of CMT and supporting treatments.”

Also as part of this collaboration, HNF will host an externally led Patient-Focused Drug Development Meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September 2018 in Washington, D.C., to bring patients, advocates, and caregivers together to speak to the agency, drug developers, and key stakeholders about what’s important to them and how they perceive the benefits and risks of treatment.

Patients, researchers, and clinicians will be asked to give their testimonies during the sessions in an effort to integrate more “real-world” data and patient insights into the drug development process.

True Reply develops voice-based data-collection and analysis methods for the future. In the area of healthcare, its objective is to boost the use of intelligent, automated voice-based surveying to enhance patient monitoring and empower patients to participate, regardless of symptom burden or socioeconomic barriers.

“HNF’s collaboration with True Reply is an opportunity to further raise CMT awareness and collect pertinent patient reported data through voice activation technology (VAT). True Reply’s VAT will help to increase knowledge from both the perspective of patients and healthcare providers (HCPs),” said Allison Moore, founder and CEO of HNF. “CMT is often misunderstood, True Reply’s technology will offer HCPs, researchers and therapy innovators patient voice data to help capture and better understand CMT, and optimize current pipeline treatments while looking for therapies.”

Ether is a cryptocurrency that has shown significant promise for its strong technology and compelling use cases. In a Forbes article written earlier this year, Mati Greenspan, senior market analyst for social trading platform eToro, called it the “most promising blockchain” with “by far the most projects being developed on it.” The platform reportedly has “three times more transactions than bitcoin.”

Forbes does, however, include the caveat that investing in cryptocurrency is highly speculative and the market is still largely unregulated. Those considering an investment should do so at their own risk.