VitaDAO is a new cooperative vehicle for community-governed and decentralized drug development. Our core mission is the acceleration of R&D in the longevity space and the extension of human life and health-span. Today, the biopharma industry booms with unprecedented late-stage investment inflows, particularly in the longevity space. However, the industry severely lacks critical early-stage funding, and incentives between patients, researchers and industry are misaligned. To align incentives and vitalize early-stage funding in longevity biopharma, VitaDAO uses a combination of novel governance frameworks in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and financial engineering tools such as algorithmic automated market makers (AMMs), all of which run on the Ethereum blockchain.
At its core, biopharma value is intellectual property (IP) rights, domain specific know-how, and research data. Research and development is now prohibitively expensive and siloed, largely due to the way IP business models incentivize monopolization of innovation. This is done through the creation of patent thickets in protected portfolios. These IP mechanisms prevent open sharing of research data, inherently disincentivizing collaboration and transparency. They prevent the public and patients from having any real ownership in biopharma IP, despite their tax dollars funding most early-stage development. Outside of grants to fund basic research, early-stage funding for drug development is extremely limited. When drugs do finally make it to market, there exist strong incentives for price gouging.
VitaDAO solves some of these problems. An open cooperative anyone can join, VitaDAO’s goal is to support and finance new therapeutics and research data in longevity science. In exchange, VitaDAO will directly hold IP rights in the novel early-stage therapeutics it supports and funds. We will grow a portfolio of IP and data assets, which we can make available and monetize through novel data marketplaces such as Ocean Marketplace. This promotes both open science and new business models.
Ownership of VitaDAO and its governance require VITA tokens. To obtain VITA tokens, a person or organization can contribute work, funds, or other resources like data and IP to VitaDAO. Ownership of VITA allows the holder to participate in democratic governance of VitaDAO, and thus direct its research, access and monetize its data repositories, and manage its IP portfolio.