VitaDAO: Do You Want to Live Forever?
Community owned collective funding early stage longevity research
Since the earliest days of history, humanity has searched for ways to achieve immortality. This dates all the way back to 200 B.C when the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, pursued this goal. In 2002, researchers found 2000-year-old texts written on thousands of pieces of wood, in the Hunan province, that detailed the emperor’s nationwide executive order to find this mythical cure. As you can very well guess this search ended up being unsuccessful. However, there is no doubting that humanity has come a long way since 200 BC with the advent of many technological and scientific breakthroughs. To highlight this, the average life expectancy in the United States has increased roughly 10 years, 69 to 79, from 1960 - 2019 (World Bank). This number should continue to go up following this trajectory and VitaDAO is hoping it could assist in ensuring that.
VitaDAO is a DAO collective funding and advancing longevity research. Since launching over a year ago, in early 2021, the community has seen tremendous growth. After a successful token launch in June 2021, the community has $9 million+ in its treasury, evaluated 30+ research projects, and has funded over $1.5 million in longevity research.
Researchers can apply for funding from VitaDAO, the scientific evaluation board (consisting of leading longevity researchers) will come up with a suggestion for funding or not, and the community of $VITA token holders then take that suggestion into consideration and vote on whether or not to fund the project. While anyone can apply the DAO primarily focuses on “early-stage, pre-patent projects that are focused on making an impact on human health and life-span. Age-related diseases include cardiovascular disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. Projects with the potential of leading to new therapeutics, interventions, diagnostics, and biomarkers will be prioritized.”
The focus on early-stage, pre-patent projects is important because “The VitaDAO community owns the intellectual property that results from the projects that it funds, either directly or in the form of an exclusive license. However, this can be negotiated on a project basis.” This new decentralized R&D model for medical research brings individuals, who have historically been left in the dark by big pharma companies, to the forefront of innovation in the space with a say on the initiatives they want to fund.
The problem that VitaDAO is aiming to solve is, “Currently, drug development is anti-competitive and stagnant because of the restrictive legal and financial frameworks that dominate it. The overarching goal is to make drug development more like software development where open source licensing helps drive further software development. Facilitating an open innovation environment empowers and ultimately benefits more people.”
Hopefully, this new R&D business model can help fund research that benefits society and lets us, and our loved ones, live a little longer. With the community just surpassing 10k+ Twitter followers, 4k+ Discord members, and a goal that has entranced humanity dating back to 200 B.C, we will be excited to watch how VitaDAO evolves to transform an archaic industry.
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