VitaDAO is a new cooperative vehicle for community-governed and decentralized drug development and intellectual property. Our core mission is the acceleration of R&D in the extension of human life and health-span. Today, the biopharma industry booms with unprecedented late-stage investment, particularly in longevity science. However, the industry severely lacks critical early-stage funding. Moreover, incentives between patients, researchers and industry are misaligned, risking monopolization of lifespan extension. At its core, biopharma value creation consists of intellectual property (IP) rights, domain-specific know-how, and research data.

Today, R&D has become prohibitively expensive and siloed, largely due to the way IP business models incentivize the 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.

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. As an open global cooperative that 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 and data 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 either through novel data marketplaces or by conventional licensing and commercialisation processes in biopharma. By utilising community-guided decision-making processes, VitaDAO aims to:

1. rapidly decrease funding decision lifecycles
2. attract the worlds leading researchers by promoting open science principles
3. democratize ownership thereof

The lifeblood of VitaDAO is its native curation and governance token: VITA. Individuals or organizations can
obtain VITA tokens by contributing work, funds, or other resources like data and IP. Ownership of VITA allows the
holder to participate in the curation and governance of VitaDAOs assets and its research.

VitaDAO Whitepaper