Decoding VitaDAO: A Paradigm Revolution in Decentralized Science

🌱 VitaDAO: A New Experimental Ground at the Intersection of Biotechnology and Blockchain

How can decentralized organizations change drug development? How can longevity research become more transparent and efficient?

Dive in and unlock VitaDAO's scientific revolution together! 

🚀 #DeSci #VitaDAO

Project Overview

VitaDAO is a DAO collective for community management and decentralized drug development. Its core mission is to accelerate R&D in the longevity field and extend human lifespan and healthspan. To achieve this, VitaDAO collectively funds and digitizes research in the form of IP-NFTs and spins off new biotech companies.

Problems to solve: Medical and biological research funding applications to NIH are highly bureaucratic and slow. There is a gap between novel ideas and commercialization, and the project aims to fill this early-stage gap.

$VITA Data Layer

Contract Address:

0x81f8f0bb1cb2a06649e51913a151f0e7ef6fa321;

Token Price: Currently reported at $4.04

Token Market Cap: $111 millions

Number of Holder Addresses: 2790+

According to Coingecko data, $VITA's all-time high reached $6.34, with a 24-hour fluctuation range of $3.76-5.02. The price shows strong resilience.

Since Vitalik showcased VitaDAO's first product VD 001 to CZ in Bangkok, VITA has entered a surge mode, with an intraday peak increase of 82.4%. The latest price is $4.04, market cap exceeds $111 millions, and the price has nearly tripled in the past week.

It is worth noting that security issues can be seen on GMGN, as the project team has neither locked the pool nor renounced ownership, posing certain risks.

However, smart money and whales still show a favorable attitude towards it.

The VitaDAO treasury currently holds assets worth about $55.84 millions, including $14.3 millions in VITA, $1.14 millions in WETH, and a series of IP assets and IP-NFTs valued at $38 millions.

In addition, VitaDAO will receive 21 million BIO tokens through the Bio Protocol's bio/acc reward program. BIO Protocol has completed its initial token offering, and founder Paul Kohlhaas stated that BIO's Launchpad and token transferability features will be launched in the first quarter of next year.

VitaDAO has also launched the VITA-FAST token in collaboration with Newcastle University's Viktor Korolchuk Lab. The Viktor Korolchuk Lab team is dedicated to identifying compounds that may initiate autophagy and rejuvenate senescent cells. The VITA-FAST token sale ended last year with a 1700% oversubscription, and the price has increased sixfold in the past week, with a market cap of $23 millions. VITA-FAST was created by a vote of VITA token holders and is officially described as the first longevity IPT implemented on Molecule through the tokenization of Korolchuk IP-NFT.

Market Trading Pairs

Uniswap	VITA/WETH
XT.COM	VITA/USDT
Uniswap	VITA-FAST/VITA
Ourbit	VITA/USDT
CoinEx	VITA/USDT
Uniswap	VITARNA/VITA
BingX	VITA/USDT
Balancer	VITA/WETH

Funded Projects

• Matrix Bio: Researches the anti-cancer and longevity effects of high molecular weight hyaluronic acid from naked mole rats on humans, initiated in March 2023. In October of the same year, VitaDAO launched the biotech company Matrix Bio, provided $300,000 in funding, and will raise funds through IP-NFT fractionalization;

• Scheibye-Knudsen Lab: Uses machine learning to process 1.04 billion prescription data to understand the impact of drugs on human lifespan;

• Fang Lab: Combines AI technology and a wet lab validation platform to identify new mitophagy-activating candidate drugs for Alzheimer's disease. Established the Fang-AI lab validation platform and successfully screened two lead compounds as drug candidates for AD. The project plans to use WP1 to screen new apoptosis activators from the compound library of the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine (FIMM) using Fang-AI and the lab validation platform, and use WP2 for AI structural modification and lab validation of two natural compounds, EFF-AA and EFF-BA. The total cost of the project is expected to be between $2.5-4 millions, and the DAO will own 100% of the project and related intellectual property.

• An Lab: Focuses on reversing periodontitis. The research results are expected to provide important preclinical IP data for non-surgical treatment methods for periodontal diseases and may drive the establishment of new companies.

• Humanity: This project connects wearable devices to monitor digital biomarkers, quantifies aging scores, and provides scientific evidence for personalized aging management;

• GERO: Uses physics and AI to understand the aging process and creates pipelines for candidate drugs and therapies targeting multiple age-related chronic diseases to slow aging;

• Oisín Biotechnologies: Develops gene medicines to combat sarcopenia and other age-related diseases. The product line includes therapies to stimulate muscle growth, selectively destroy fat cells, and eliminate senescent cells. Oisín Biotechnologies also completed a $15 millions Series A financing in July 2024, led by AbbVie Ventures, the investment arm of US pharmaceutical giant AbbVie. The funds will mainly be used for research on eliminating unwanted fat cells and enhancing muscle mass.

• Mantis Photonics: A hyperspectral imaging device for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. The project has already obtained two patent protections and is supported by a peer-reviewed proof-of-concept study.

• Michal Siewierski: Funded the longevity hacker film "Longevity Hackers" to promote scientific research in the healthspan field and raise public awareness and interest in the field.

• Repair Biotechnologies: A preclinical-stage biotech company developing a universal cell therapy for atherosclerosis, aiming to reduce cardiovascular event risk and improve the efficacy of existing drug treatments.

• HDAX Therapeutics: Develops HDAC6 inhibitors with higher blood-brain barrier penetration and lower toxicity. Has shown potential to extend lifespan in animal models.

• ExcepGen Inc: Develops an RNA therapy platform called RNAx, which improves RNA vaccine efficacy by optimizing RNA delivery and regulating cell signaling, especially for hard-to-target antigens such as universal influenza viruses.

• Cyclarity Therapeutics: Develops a new cyclodextrin capsule drug based on computational design, aiming to extract harmful biomolecules such as oxidized cholesterol accumulated in the body, especially in cardiovascular diseases.

Recent Developments

The funded VitaRNA/Artan Bio team recently successfully identified and validated two promising lead candidates from an initial screening of 15 candidate oligonucleotides and has reached a manufacturing partnership with biotech multinational Lonza to ensure that VitaRNA's main candidate drug ARTAN-102 will be produced according to industry standards for preclinical and clinical research.

VitaRNA/Artan Bio previously raised $300,000 through IP-NFT tokenization and will have the next round of sales in Q1 2025.

On October 17, VitaDAO launched the internal interdisciplinary scientist network VitaLabs, aiming to develop aging research internally and enhance the democratic ownership of intellectual property through Intellectual Property Tokens (IPT). Specifically, VitaLabs will form interdisciplinary teams during each 4-month window to discover ideas and conduct experiments, as well as regularly update data. Successful projects will advance to in-depth research and potential derivative creation. VitaDAO also launched the VitaLabs Fellowship Program to attract talent to participate in longevity research.

Team and Funding

_	Position
Tyler Golato	Molecule Founder & Chief Scientist

Tyler Golato once worked at the US National Institute on Aging (NIH / NIA / IRP), studying under Dr. David M. Wilson III and Dr. Vilhelm Bohr, focusing on repairing endogenous DNA damage.

He also worked at the Robert Fine Laboratory at Columbia University, researching the mechanisms of chemoresistance in pancreatic cancer and developing novel therapeutic strategies for various cancers.

2023-01-30: Investment amount $4.08 millions; investment round not disclosed

Investors include: Shine Capital, L1D, Spaceship DAO, Beaker DAO, Balaji Srinivasan, Pfizer, Joe Betts-LaCroix

2021-06-23: Public round investment; investment amount $5.1 millions

Investors not disclosed

Summary

The DeSci track is not a newly emerging field; as early as 2023, CZ mentioned it on Twitter. However, DeSci only briefly attracted attention, and subsequent development was lukewarm and did not receive much market attention until recently when Binance Labs announced its investment in BIO Protocol and CZ and Vitalik jointly participated in a DeSci conference, bringing the track back into the public eye.

The main goal of DeSci is to leverage the decentralized, transparent, and tamper-proof characteristics of technology to solve a series of pain points in the traditional scientific research system, including uneven distribution of research funding, unclear ownership of intellectual property, high barriers to academic publishing, and inefficient interdisciplinary collaboration.

Core applications in DeSci include:

1. Decentralized funding: Supporting research projects through smart contracts and token mechanisms to reduce unfairness in funding allocation.

2. Intellectual property protection: Using blockchain to record ownership of research results, ensuring that the attribution of each research achievement is transparent and immutable.

3. Open scientific publishing: Eliminating the intermediary role of traditional journals and promoting the rapid sharing and dissemination of research results.

4. Interdisciplinary collaboration: Building open collaboration platforms to enable efficient cooperation among researchers worldwide.

VitaDAO is one of the benchmark projects in the DeSci track, focusing on anti-aging and longevity research, exploring how decentralized governance models can drive innovation in the life sciences field. VitaDAO was established as early as 2021 and even received investment from the world-renowned pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Its decentralized design not only empowers researchers and investors but also drives innovation and acceleration in biomedical technology.

The successful implementation of DeSci solutions by VitaDAO has brought a fully decentralized funding and collaboration platform to global life sciences research. It provides a mature reference for the DeSci model: managing funding allocation and intellectual property through smart contracts to maximize transparency and efficiency in the research process.

Building a more inclusive research ecosystem is an important goal of DeSci, and VitaDAO's community-driven mechanism is a model of this goal. Its decentralized governance model not only makes research decision-making more democratic but also lowers the resource requirements for research participants, which is especially significant for independent scientists lacking traditional funding channels.

Promoting the rapid transformation of research results: In the traditional research system, the transformation of results from the laboratory to practical application is often lengthy and costly. VitaDAO's distributed collaboration and open intellectual property sharing model greatly shorten the transformation cycle of research results and facilitate the rapid commercialization of scientific achievements.

With the continuous maturity of decentralized technology and blockchain, VitaDAO has the potential to become an important platform for future research funding and innovation. Of course, it still faces challenges in regulation, funding, and community collaboration. Whether it can overcome these bottlenecks in the future will determine its influence in the global biomedical field.