VitaDAO Raises $4.1M For Longevity Research, Backed By Pfizer

Decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) VitaDAO has closed a $4.1 million funding round with Pfizer Ventures and others to support research into improving human longevity.

In 2021, Tyler Golato of the decentralised biotech protocol Molecule launched VitaDAO to raise money for anti-aging research. In 2022, over $3.5 million was allocated to research on ageing-related disorders, cellular biology, and mending age-related harm to the body.

BeakerDAO and Spaceship DAO are two among the decentralised science groups that contributed to the most recent fundraising round, along with longevity enthusiasts like former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and Retro Biosciences’ Joe Betts-LaCroix. Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum, was among the early investors.

Starting with Bitcoin’s rejection of central banking & endless inflation, the cryptoeconomy has challenged virtually every premise of the state-controlled, paper-based financial system that we’ve inherited.

So far? Plenty of risks, plenty of loss — and undeniable progress.

— Balaji (@balajis) June 29, 2021

Pfizer, as VitaDAO claims, is the first pharmaceutical business to participate in the incubation and marketing of VitaDAO initiatives and vote on DAO proposals.

The fund raised will go toward developing VitaDAO’s first biotech startup, expected to be unveiled in Q1 2023. Through its collaboration with Molecule, the organisation also intends to increase its investment in commercialisation and licence its NFT intellectual property.

According to Laurence Ion, VitaDAO’s deal-flow steward, some of the projects the organisation has sponsored have advanced to later phases of research, such as clinical trials with Mantis Photonics, which aims to diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease using retinal imaging.

“There’s a move away in medicine to solving the symptoms of ageing,” said VitaDAO’s operations steward, Todd White. “There’s a lot of discussion around ‘is ageing a disease?’ A lot of people are of the mindset now that ageing and a lot of the diseases of ageing … can actually be resolved.”

Holders of the group’s native VITA token vote on which projects to back, and a team of stewards facilitates the implementation of these projects, as explained by White.

Ion said the organisation plans to transcend geographic boundaries using its democratic governance framework to create a potential future sovereignty network. He opined, “I think we need a new paradigm. We want to be a community as big as some countries and as resourceful as some countries.”

Delaying the ageing process and other methods of increasing human lifespan have long interested crypto fans. In December 2021, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong invested in a company called NewLimit to find a cure for ageing. In the same year, Jed McCaleb, formerly the CTO of Ripple and now a co-founder of Stellar, established the Astera Institute to support research into extending the human lifespan.

According to White, it is no accident that the crypto sector and the study of ageing are so closely related. “If you think about how crypto started, it was about breaking down barriers and fixing a system they perceived as broken. Well, the same applies in longevity.”

He said, “There’s a lot more innovation and a lot more enthusiasm to try new things coming from the crypto community.”