Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Paul Kohlhaas & Tyler Golato: VitaDAO – The Collective Funding Longevity Research

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

VitaDAO is a decentralized collective funding early stage longevity research. Their mission is to extend human lifespan by researching, financing, and commercializing longevity therapeutics in an open and democratic manner.We were joined by Tyler Golato and Paul Kohlhaas, co-founders of Molecule and initiators of VitaDAO to talk about how drug discovery and approval currently works, what the status of longevity research is, what role IP plays -- and how all of this could change in the future with DAOs like VitaDAO.Topics covered in this episode:Paul and Tyler's backgrounds and how they came to work on VitaDAOLongevity - thinking of aging as a diseaseWhere is the research at today?How longevity research currently takes place in the pharmaceutical industryHow VitaDAO is alleviating patency issuesThe first funded project with the Knudsen lab in Copenhagen - MoleculeHow DAOs make the decisionsEpisode links:The Molecule blogVitaDAOGoldman asks: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?'VitaDAO DiscordVitaDAO on TwitterMolecule on TwitterPaul on TwitterTyler on TwitterSponsors:Chorus One: Chorus One runs validators on cutting edge Proof of Stake networks such as Cosmos, Solana, Celo, Polkadot and Oasis. - https://epicenter.rocks/chorusoneParaSwap: ParaSwap aggregates all major DEXs and makes sure you beat the market price at every single swap and with the lowest slippage - http://paraswap.io/epicenter - paraswap.io/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/403

This is Epicenter, Episode 403 with guests Paul Kohlers and Tyler Golato. Welcome to Epicenter, the podcast where we interview crypto founders, builders and thought leaders. I'm Friedrike Ernst and I'm here with... Hi, I am here. And today we're speaking with Paul and Tyler from Vita Dow. Vita Dow is a DAO that entered the scene publicly a couple of weeks ago, but has been around in the background for quite a while. And Vita Dow actually concerns itself with...

with longevity and longevity research. Before we get started, let me take a minute to thank the sponsors of today's episode. Paraswap is an easy-to-use decks aggregator that beats the market price. It's fast and liquid and it's now integrated with ledger and making it more secure than before. Next on the roadmap is an integration with chain link keeper that allows you to place limit orders off-chain. These orders will then be executed when the price conditions are met, basically emulating a C-Fi experience on D-Fi. So stay tuned.

I would also like to thank Chorus One. Corus provides staking solutions on 25 major networks like Solana and Cosmos. 10,000 parties delegate to them assets that are worth over $1 billion in total. Corus now also offers a white-label solution for running branded nodes on Corse 1's seller infrastructure. follow them on Twitter at Chorus One and check out their podcast on YouTube that they have recently resumed recording. Paul and Tyler, it's super good to have you here.

Great to be here, Frederica. Thank you. Awesome to be here. Cool. Let's dive right in. Both of you. Can you give us a little bit of background on you, where you come from academically and basically what made you interested in longevity research in the first place? Yeah, great to be on the show. really enjoy epicenter. Hi everyone, so my name is Paul Coloss. I got really interested in biohacking and pharma actually during high school already. I spend a lot of time in online forums,

like early, early Reddit, firms like Blue Light actually, in other forms where people were discussing various analogs to known compounds in kind of been very open source fashion. And what you could really call as like the open the early days of open source pharma communities where you had people that were looking either looking at analogs of of scheduled substances or actually looking at analogs to medication that they simply couldn't afford or didn't have access to for example you had early communities that were looking at alternatives for insulin treatments or alternatives to HIV treatments and from these these are really the early days of like biohacking communities that persist to this day and unfortunately actually

lots of these communities have been kind of, have been since then, like, banned on, from Reddit or, like, from Google searches. Back in the day, you could simply search a compound and you'd find some obscure forum via Google. And so I then went on and studied economics in Switzerland. And while I was studying, I got into trading biotech stocks. And so we had, like, a small group of trading friends who were just, like,

analyzing different stock trends. And one person there was doing an internship at Bitcoin Swiss, one of the first Bitcoin Hops and, exchanges in Switzerland and through that got really interested in Bitcoin and the broader Bitcoin community. It was also just around the time of the Mount Gaux hacked. Really, really interesting days back then. I then did an internship in Burma, actually, in Myanmar for three months and realized how stringent capital controls were like back then in that country and how Bitcoin was really being actually used on the ground for by people to like smuggle US dollars into

the country. And then in 2015, got really into into into, in 2015, got really into, in, into the Ethereum community, began working in the open-dose Ethereum space and organizing meetups in South Africa, did a project in digital identity with UNICEF, and through that, got in touch with consensus, and then started doing a lot of work on digital identity and data marketplaces. At Uport, actually, which is now a part of the Uport team became three box. It's really crazy thinking back how much of the industry changes so quickly. And then through doing a lot of work on data marketplaces, had this aha moment where I thought, hey,

a lot of the incentives and misalignment in the pharmaceutical system could be changed by adopting these incentives that people were developing in data marketplaces. So essentially how companies can share data openly and really work collaboratively on these datasets. And at the same time, so back then, this is going back when I was 18, I did a lot of work looking at the macroeconomics of pharma, so why it takes so long for certain drugs to get to market. And so in 2018, I met Tyler,

and we began kind of conceptualizing how a marketplace for drug development, pharmaceutical development could look like. And Tyler's background at the time was deep actually in biogenitology and aging research. And actually, Tyler, I'll put that hand it over to you. Cool, yeah. So I started out my sort of career believing that I wanted to be a physician. When I was very young, my sister spent a lot of time in hospitals. And I sort of had an early imprinting where I think just at a very high level I saw like when I was five or six years old, like, these are people who do great things for other people.

neither of my parents graduated from high school, so they were a bit confused, I think, about this desire to be a physician, but I sort of pursued that steadfast for the majority of my early academic career. And then when I got into university, I studied biochemistry and molecular biology. I was spending quite a lot of time at hospitals. I was working as a nurse aide on the side and really became interested in not only in medicine, but also in research. And sort of saw relatively early on that medicine was quite applied. I had a strong interest in cancer somewhat early on just because of touchpoints with my family as well. While I was studying, I began really looking into oncology and then sort of after graduating, joined an experimental

therapeutics fellowship at Columbia University where I was working to develop therapeutics initially for pancreatic cancer, glioblastoma, neuroendocrine tumors, and various types of phympers. And various types of of cancer. During that time, there were a couple things that happened that had quite a profound impact on me. One was just realizing the sort of barriers to care and access that existed, particularly in the United States, in the context of the sort of health system there. So we would have clinical trials for participants that often didn't have health insurance. And if they didn't meet the inclusion criteria for these clinical trials, the hospital in many cases would turf them away or wouldn't actually treat them because cancer is not considered to be like an acute emergency.

You don't have, let's say, insurance, the hospital is not obligated to treat you. And this had a pretty profound effect on the way that I looked at health care and health care delivery in the United States. And increasingly, I think because I saw the lack of autonomy that many physicians have and some of the struggles that existed to actually be able to really treat patients, I became increasingly interested in the research component and sort of stopped having a strong desire to be a physician and started to have more of a strong desire to be a researcher where maybe there was an opportunity to push the field forward. I think in oncology, if you're a practicing oncologist outside of academia, you're really applying a standard of care. And that standard of care is often quite predictable in terms of how it's actually going to

affect a patient and how it's going to play out. During that time simultaneously, I also really became interested in sort of more preventative approaches to medicine and more specifically biogerontology or longevity research. I think I was a little bit frustrated with how we go about treating things like cancer, which is in this very granular, very siloed way, often not really thinking about how do you treat mutation or prevent mutation, but how do you, for example, treat a specific cancer or a specific cancer subtype? And the way that we treat cancer as marinoe, is really brutal for lack of a better term. You sort of engage in this war with the body using a series of highly toxic drugs

and the outcomes are sometimes okay and some cancers. And in other times, you know, it's not really an efficient treatment modality. So I became interested in biogorontology because what I was seeing at the time was this idea that many age-related diseases were bound together, a tight. together by this relationship to aging, aging being the greatest risk factor for many diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer's to neurodegeneration in general, cardiovascular disease. And so when I finished my fellowship at Columbia, I joined the National Institute on Aging, which is part of the National Institutes of Health in the United States. And I joined the laboratory of molecular gerontology,

where the majority of my work was really focused on DNA damage and repair. I had to focus specifically on oxidative stress and oxidative damage, the basic excision repair pathway. And and also segmental progerias, which are basically a series of accelerated aging disorders that we study as a general model to understand the aging process. And these are a really fascinating group of syndromes where you have individuals that are maybe five, six, seven years old. And phenotypically look like they're maybe 60 or 70. They have, you know, you've probably seen, you know, on the internet or something, these very young children that look like they're incredibly old. While it was there, I really started to realize that, you know, the way that we,

approach a lot of medicine is is due to you know clinical criteria that had been defined observationally maybe 20 30 40 years ago a lot of the definitions we have around disease are probably guiding us in in the wrong direction and I thought this more holistic and more reduced sort of view of aging as a disease was was really fascinating but yeah after I finished at the National Institute on aging I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do I was also struggling with this sort of the sort of intrinsic problems that I think I've that I have with how research is funded, how medicine is applied. I thought maybe I wanted to do something at a more systemic level, as opposed to something, you know, spending my career working on a single protein or something

like that. But before that, I also wanted to get a completely different view of healthcare. I moved to South Africa where I worked on HIV vaccine development for a period of time, just trying to understand what a different healthcare context is like. And instead of focusing on diseases have affluence, like aging, for example, I wanted to see the sort of other side of the coin. Worked on HIV vaccine development for almost a year. And then some of the funding dried up after that founded a small predictive analytics company just to keep myself afloat while I was trying to really figure out what to do with my time.

And then, yeah, after a mutual friend was introduced to Paul, this was, I guess right around three years ago now or a little more than three years ago. Yeah, and Paul was obviously coming from a very different space than me. I had been, I'd known about Bitcoin and blockchain from the very early days. I had some Bitcoin as early as like, I think, 2012, but was always sort of like a skeptic in terms of, I think, not really seeing a huge number of applications that I thought were particularly exciting. And Paul came to me with, I think, some really early ideas for how we can use some of the

systems that were emerging in the Web 3 and decentralization space in really interesting ways and how we could potentially change the way that we interact with pharmaceutical intellectual intellectual property. And I thought this was a super captivating sort of thesis and an idea. So we had a series of conversations and I sort of dropped what I was doing and joined full time with molecule. And we've been, yeah, sort of thinking about this problem ever since. And Vida-Dal is one of really the first, I would say, real-world example.

examples of a lot of the learnings that we've picked up over the past three years in practice. I'm actually curious about how, you know, like this longevity space is different from traditional healthcare. At one level, you can argue that traditional healthcare is all about longevity, right? So I go to the doctor and the doctor sees my cholesterol's kind of high and they prescribe me statins and maybe delay my heart attack by five years. That's longevity. Or in, In my case, I have cancer and I get a bunch of chemotherapy in the traditional healthcare space. I may get 10, 20 years of extra life. That's longevity.

So in many ways, like the healthcare system has always been about increasing the lifespan of patients and enabling them to live that lifespan better. How does viewing aging as a disease provide us something different from the traditional health care system? Yeah, so I mean, you're absolutely right in terms of, you know, the healthcare system should generally be focused on human longevity, but I think what we tend to get is a healthcare system that's developed in reaction to disease. And one where basically the expectation is that people get sick and then we treat them. And so, you know, as a sort of interesting point,

In medical school, you don't really have preventative medicine courses. We typically go to our doctors maybe once a year for like a checkup, but a lot of our interactions with the health care system are at the point of us being sick and not really at the point of how do we preserve our health or how do we prevent disease. So at a very high level, the first thing that's fundamentally different about how the aging field sort of approaches health care potentially. And it's still very nascent, right? this is a field that's still developing.

But the primary consideration there is really how do, instead of how do we treat disease, it's how do we prevent disease and how do we prolong health span or, let's say, healthy years of life? This is something where if you look at what's happening pharmacologically in the space, in the sort of longevity space, what is being researched or really therapeutics that you would begin taking maybe midway through your life or even when you're still long that would work to preserve your health and keep you healthy. And I think the other point that's sort of interesting is that, you know, we think about medicine as something that is, you know, highly advanced and highly evolved, but I would pose the question that other than communicable diseases, so things that can be treated

with antibiotics and other than things that can be treated maybe surgically, I would say that we're not actually very good at medicine in general. We do a lot of management of, chronic care. So, for example, if you have heart disease, you're probably going to be taking heart disease medication for the rest of your life. If you have diabetes, you're probably going to be taking diabetes medicines for the rest of your life. But interestingly, it is also this sort of problem, I think, in terms of how drug development is incentivized that relates to, you know, sort of the macroeconomics of pharma are really tuned to like the sort of best drug for a pharmaceutical company, in my opinion, is one that keeps you alive and keeps you on medication

for the rest of your life. Paul, you look like you wanted to jump in and say something there. Yeah, there's a really famous report from Goldman Sachs, I think it was published in 2017, and it's titled, Is Curing Patients a Sustainable Business Model? And the report analyzed a new hepatitis C drug that had been put on the market by Novartis, I think. And essentially, this new hep C drug was a pill-based treatment. that essentially cured hepatitis C, almost cured it in most cases within six months. And Novartis had previously had a whole range of other treatments on the market for Hep C. And Goldman Sachs basically just ran a basic analysis saying,

cool, you guys brought this new medication out to the market, which was in some cases, in some countries, extremely highly priced, by the way, I think upwards of $100,000 per treatment when it came onto the market, meaning that a large part of the patient population couldn't even afford it. But coming back to this, so they ran this analysis, and based on this analysis, downgraded Novartis' stock, saying you guys developed something that is now curing your customers, so this is not a sustainable business model.

And maybe this also goes to the heart a little bit of longevity research, and I think what Tyler said is, like, I think parts of the pharmaceutical system today and the healthcare system aren't actually geared at promoting longevity. In some cases, they're more geared at promoting a customer base and sustaining that customer base, which doesn't necessarily, lead to longer or happier lives.

So the other sort of problem, I think, is that, again, we talked about this a little bit before, but like aging is not considered to be a disease. And what you tend to get in health care is this extremely granular approach to disease. So we spend, we've had historically what we've called a war on cancer, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to treat individual cancers. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on trying to treat all of us. Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease. Most people die of either cardiovascular disease or cancer.

We spend a huge amount of resources trying to treat all of the individual sub-phenotypes of these diseases. And all of these things are bound together by some commonalities that are probably targetable from a therapeutic perspective. So it is probably the case that you could, for example, with something like cancer or anything that is, let's say, the result of progressive decline of the integrity of DNA or mutation, you could, for example, target DNA repair and try to bolster that indogynously to the point where individuals didn't really start to accumulate mutations. So I think it's really longevity in aging research, while that field itself is highly stratified and there's a lot of different

opinions on even what aging is or how we should approach treating it and, you know, You have the sort of health span people and the lifespan people and the transhumanists and the very practical people. I think the overall unifying theme is this idea that we can extend human health span by taking a more preventative approach to health care of care of. Just to add one last point there on Rwanda says, actually I find when I first got into the longevity and aging community, actually through Tyler in I think late 18, early 2019, somewhere early. some of the earliest kind of researchers or communities that we were engaging was the longevity community.

And it has a lot of similarities to some of the tribalism that you typically find in the cryptocurrency space. Maybe just to add that. So it was an immediate culture fit. So, I mean, viewing aging as a disease, this is a total paradigm shift in the field of healthcare, right? So can you give us an idea where the research is currently at? What should I as a healthy 34-year-old woman expect of the longevity research?

Do I expect to, you know, see 100, 115? And how do you guys go about this? So basically, do I take supplements? Is it lifestyle or is it both? Yeah, so I mean, I'm pretty conservative when it comes to punting on these sort of things. And I think other people, you could talk to 10 different researchers of sort of figureheads in the field. And some will tell you that, you know, I think Opry famously claimed that the first person lived to be a thousand years old is alive today. There's other people that would say that, you know, it would be unbelievable or an amazing sort of achievement if we could manage to live to be 100 in good health without this precipitous decline.

typically occurs. I think I'm fairly, I'm fairly conservative when it comes to making these sort of estimations. I mean, what I, and also in terms of telling you what the right thing to do for your, for your sort of personal health would be, what I can say is that there's, you know, we have yet to find a therapeutic or an intervention that we have a very high degree of certainty, that it extends human lifespan. And where the research has been, let's say that there's been some really interesting developments are sort of in the context of certain geroprotectives, which we've seen work fairly well in model organisms, and also in some behavioral interventions that I would say are probably the most effective things that we have or

understand to, let's say, delay the aging process. These are things like caloric restriction, which I think in some model organisms and in non-human primates has been shown to be somewhat effective. Intermittent fasting has also been shown to have a certain benefit. Obviously, the very, the very obvious things like eating a good diet and what that means, I mean, there's many different opinions on, but yeah, maybe things like avoiding too many sugars and also exercise is probably the most important thing. I think interestingly, there's a lot of things that we know already that are quite good for our health that maybe we don't do because they're, you know, as a species, because they're difficult or require a lot of effort.

And I think what people want to see is a sort of miracle pill in some ways that comes about and encapsulate all of these different things pharmacologically. And there is work being done on that, right? There's things like fasting memetics and exercise memetics that are basically a pill that, you know, might, for example, increase mitochondrial thermogenesis and then allow you to lose weight. Or, you know, there's all these different sort of pharmacological interventions. But I would say that the best advice that I could do. give would be to, you know, find something that works for you personally. If, if intermittent fasting

is something that you're comfortable doing, then I think that's a, it could be a tremendous benefit. But for me, I think the most interesting thing that I sort of learned during my time at the NIA was, was that there's, and I'll, this is a little bit of long story, but I'll try to, I'll try to keep it brief. We've tried to study populations of centenarians and super centenarians, so people who live to be 100 or 100 plus around the world to understand what it is that separates them from other people or why they live particularly long lives. And one of the populations that we spend a lot of time looking at are Sardinians. So people in this region of Italy where there's relatively low incidence of heart disease, low incidence of certain cancers, and a lot of people who live very long lives.

And some number of years ago, and I might be slightly off with the specifics, but I think it's a really interesting example. There was a group of Sardinians that might. I believe it's called Roswell, Pennsylvania. So they moved from Italy to this place in Pennsylvania and they needed to integrate into the context of American society and sort of assimilate. And within like one generation, this population that previously didn't have any incidents of heart disease or cancer, started to end or diabetes, started to have diabetes, heart disease, various cancers. And what they found was that the sort of stress of American life, the keeping up but the Jones's mentality, the idea that you need to be someone, the fact that these people

were probably used to having lots of time spent with family, long periods of meals, not a huge number of external stressors. They watched this population from an epigenetic perspective change very quickly. And so one of the biggest takeaways here was, you know, what is the best way to promote longevity? It's probably to avoid stress and to live a relatively happy life. The longest live person ever was Jean Comanche who lived to be. 1202 and a half and you know her secret was port wine and and cigarettes so for me to come and tell

you exactly what the what the right answer is is quite difficult and it's probably personal but for everyone but yeah I think avoiding stress and having exercise are two of the most obvious things but I'm also yeah I also hope that we find pharmacological advances that bring us to 150 or 200 within our lifetime in it you know and promote health This is making me question my life choices as a crypto person and three-time mom. So maybe let's talk about how longevity research currently takes place in the farmer industry. So basically what is currently being researched and why do you guys think the status quo is not good enough? For longevity specifically?

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, longevity. is not something that pharmaceutical companies are laser focused on, specifically because aging is not a disease, and therefore you cannot target aging as an indication in the clinic. So what you tend to have is a lot of research being done that is sort of proximal to aging or that is sort of, you know, I can target neurodegeneration and maybe that's a proxy of aging or I can target, you know, maybe atherosclerosis or diabetes. And these things are sort of, yeah,

indicators of the aging process. But what you tend to have are a lot of people who maybe see that this is going to change and they fund this really at this sort of startup stage. So we know that there's a lot of biotech startups focused on longevity that maybe have products that, you know, one day could target aging in a clinic and maybe they're doing the same sort of thing at the moment. Maybe they're targeting a different indication that sort of resembles aging or, you know, give some information into, you know, how the drug might react in aging.

And you also have quite a lot of, not quite a lot of, but a reasonable amount of very early stage funding, so the type of work that the National Institute on aging, for example, funds on sort of mechanistically understanding aging. So work to understand what is aging. But you don't have, you know, the sort of robust drug discovery pipelines that you find intrinsic to most therapeutic areas in pharma. Maybe to add something here. So because aging isn't, so pharma could be interested in longevity or like, let's say

longevity drugs, because it's a massive potential market. But because it's not considered a disease, you can't really prescribe, like a doctor couldn't prescribe medication for it and no insurance company would pay it. You can't, you don't typically take it through this, through this like typical FDA, like drug approval process, you could, like, aging drugs as a supplement. And I think most of the, most of the industry to that regard really still plays in the supplement, supplement kind of space, which also always gives it this, this not very serious, like, perception upon, like, let's say, among medical professionals, because supplements are always in this, like, in this little bit

vague, like, vague of a space. But I actually, so if, if aging was considered a disease, then you could actually take these drugs into clinical trials, into the clinic, as Tala was saying, and they could form a part of the typical large pharma discovery pipeline. But they currently don't. And it'll be interesting to see whether that changes. I think there's several proposals to the FDA to actually make aging a disease in the broader sense. Tyler, do you know where those currently are those advances?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, in my opinion, some of the most important work being done in the space currently is the sort of advocacy around the regulatory side of this. So, I mean, near Barzalai is someone who has actively challenged this with the tame trial. Yet, Metformin, he's out of Einstein. Brian Kennedy's been very vocal about this as well. I mean, everyone who's, I think, quite a serious player in the space is advocating for this. And I know there's a lot of work being done trying to lobby on a political level to get this changed. And I would say, from my view, we're optimistically five or so years away from this, maybe less could be wrong about that, but that's my personal feeling.

But I think that a lot of the movement that you're seeing in the startup space and a lot of the movement that you're seeing generally the growth in the sort of longevity field in general is due to this being highly anticipated, the fact that this definition is going to change in the sort of next years. and eventually we will start seeing movement of these therapeutics into the clinic to target aging as a disease. But you can imagine that there's also a lot of factors that complicate treating aging as disease, right, from a clinical trial perspective. These are highly longitudinal sort of studies. It's very difficult to control, you know, for any sort of number of factors over human lifespan.

When I was living in Baltimore and when I was working at the NIA, you know, They have the Baltimore longitudinal study of aging, which is the longest running sort of study on aging. I think that exists in the world. And that's been running for maybe 70 or so years now, perhaps a little bit less. But, I mean, yeah, that's like almost one full generation end. And so it's very, yeah, it's a very difficult thing to study. And I think we need to also be quite innovative around the endpoints they're actually measuring to understand whether or not something is affecting aging. From my perspective, one of the most promising things, or like not promising things, but

easiest things to look at are actually like known natural compounds that we know of that extend aging, not by 30 or so years, but maybe by five or 10 years. So there's been recent studies about spermadine, which are looking very well. There's reservatrol. There's things like rapamycin that have been tested in humans for quite a while. or even in some cases for thousands of years. There's certain Chinese herbs that have been known to extend human lifespan and actually looking into this natural compound space

where there is much more longitudinal or even anecdotal data. And so those are then things that can extend human lifespan statistically maybe by five or so years, maybe by 10. And with these longitudinal studies, you have to actually imagine how difficult it is to develop something that can affect aging effectively because you'll have to test for a long time to know whether it actually works. And so there's a, yeah, there's a couple of good historical examples to go by.

And then there's a whole field of, let's say, natural supplements that we could also develop analogs off. That might work fairly well. But, yeah. These examples kind of illustrate the difficulty with the field, right? So, I mean, I'm aware of the example of metformin, which is, for our listeners, this diabetes drug that's been used. in the clinic for like 40 or 50 years. And one of the general observations about this drug is diabetics on this drug have a lower rate of heart attacks.

And maybe, I think there's a lower incidence of cancer or something like that. So it's like one of these drugs for which you have like very strong data because you're prescribing into millions of diabetics. You have very good safety profile and it might extend human health span or lifespan in some way. And yet, like, the field is struggling to convert that into a medicine because you can't patent metformin anymore and you can't make a blockbuster product out of metformin.

Ergo, there is no financial incentive to actually study this properly and convert it into a drug for all of us. And, yeah, that's kind of where where most of these things are stuck at, right? So a different example that Tally mentioned, rappamysin, it's known for 40 years. And you couldn't basically go and take rapamycin if you wanted to accept the tradeoffs of rapamycin,

which are actually... Rapamycin is not an easy drug probably to take for a very long time. But still, I cannot extend my lifespan via things that humanity knows because the financial incentives aren't there to develop these these therapies. But what stops you from just having a doctor prescribe it to you, right? Because metformin, I mean, is being prescribed for things like diabetes and PCOS and hormonal things, right?

So why won't a doctor prescribe it to you? Because clearly you can buy it on the market, right? I think the issue is that like you can take metformin that way, but then you're not really generating data when I'm buying metformin of some of some Chinese vendor and eating it eating it myself. What you want is actually doctors to prescribe it properly and everybody who takes metformin to be tracked properly so that humanity learns from this. We don't fully understand. I mean, so maybe we have some insight that in general it might be a good idea for most elderly people, even who are non-diabetic to take metformin. But we don't

necessarily know for what does it look like for a 30-year-old person to go and start taking metformin every day. How should it be dosed? How, you know, how intermittently should they, should they be taking it all the time? If I start taking it early in life, does that mean that maybe later in life it won't be so efficacious? I mean, this is part of the reason that we do clinical studies or clinical trials is to really understand not only the drug, but how it should be taken, what are the effects over time, how do you optimize the sort of dosing. So I would say that even if you were able to go out and find a physician even to prescribe you met metformin as an off-label for targeting the aging process or something we don't really know how that should be how that

should be dosed and when the optimal time to start taking it is and it's because of this this like a like mayor said this sort of lack of commercial incentives metformin has been off-paid for for a long time and this is also why the tame trial has had some difficulty is it's you know who's going to to fund this if there's no ability to have a clear commercial pathway afterwards. And that's where people begin to get quite innovative. You know, maybe they look at analogs or maybe they do some medicinal chemistry to try and create a new drug. But one of the interesting questions that we might ask ourselves here is, you know,

are we creating analogs and doing medicinal chemistry to get a better drug? Or are we doing it to create some sort of way to patent to compound? And I think these are really. interesting questions because I think in many cases what you'll find with medchem and even drug development in general is that the reasons that people try to create these new drugs are not always driven by like what's best for the patient or what is the best drug possible they're actually driven by like well how am I going to patent this and commercialize it and that's actually a really profound thing when you think about the things that are actually driving chemical considerations

for a drug that people are going to consume are often not really driven by the patient of the end point. They're driven by this sort of case for intellectual property. So is the question really how to fund a public good in the space of farmer? So basically, I mean, as I understand it from you guys now, I can patent a chemical compound for a number of years, but I can't patent the metadata of how to take it or when to take it and so on. So is the mechanism design faulty here? So basically, Basically, my question is, I mean, maybe let's kind of take this into the Vita Dau space. So basically, how is Vita Dau going to alleviate these problems?

And how is the research going to be conducted through Vita Dau or funded by Vita Dau or orchestrated by Vita Dau? So maybe to start off at like a very high level, I think that you have like, I think Paul and I, if you ask this both, like, what would be the. dream sort of design space for therapeutics and intellectual property would probably be a fully open source system where there were no patents whatsoever and that these things were incentivized by, you know, it's always in the interest of a society to have a productive, sort of healthy population, right? And that we should all figure out a way for healthcare to be free, for it to be accessible for drugs to not need these sort of commercial protections and for us to figure out ways to to sort of make all of these drugs a reality. But the unfortunate truth is that we operate in the

confines of this system that is very, very established, very difficult to change and where we can probably move the needle very slowly. And in order to move the needle slowly, we probably need to create an entirely new set of incentives for how drugs are developed that is still somewhat rooted in the context of the current system. So when we began thinking about intellectual property, what we sort of imagined was how do you transition from the sort of current monopolistic patent-based system into something that is more decentralized or less monopolistic, more open source, but still where there's sufficient incentives to be able to play with pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, and everyone who's sort of operating in the space.

Maybe to add something. So we can also say why are patents. So I believe that patents are very inefficient actually at incentivizing innovation today. And there's a ton of academic literature more broadly about patents and patent trolling and today how the patent system is actually being abused and companies suing each other litigating each other constantly to hinder each other from innovating. And if we think about how patents really work today, so patents are normally owned by large organizations that want to protect their innovation.

And a patent is designed to incentivize a company or an organization to invest a lot of upfront R&D capital in order to make it worth their while to invest it and then to be able to commercialize it later on to recoup those costs. And so the government essentially uses its power to invests. force the patent through violence in essence, as is the power of the government. But so what this does now is patents often reside within organizations that don't share data about them. So when one, let's take the biopharmac space, one, let's say, when a biotech company sells a patent or a whole company is bought, it will often only share the positive data about a specific therapeutic or drug

that it's developing. So a company could run 100 trials and only share the two trials that were positive and hide the 98 ones that were negative in order to kind of sell the drug on. And so if we think about how science should work, science should really be open and collaborative and data shouldn't be reproduced. But there's a very common issue in the space called the reproducibility crisis where often companies need to time and time again find out, like create similar data sets, which leads to enormous cost to me for the industry as assets travel up this, like this drug development pipeline. And so we began asking ourselves, wait.

So if patents are only owned by single organizations, those organizations only have incentive to share positive data, not the negative ones, so a lot of is being redone. So how can you change this? Essentially by fractionalizing ownership in patents and distributing it between a much larger group of stakeholders. And so if you take this to the end degree, imagine if a patent that represented a drug was publicly traded. So anyone could buy shares in this patent.

It's still protected through the patent, but now it's publicly owned. And now different people could essentially go long if they had positive data or they could go short if they had negative data. And some of this actually came from Simon de la Rouvier's super early. Some of this design thinking came from Simon de la Rueva's very early work on curation markets. General Mayer, you also worked on, I think, in 2017-ish very early days. There's basically thinking around information markets. So today, an information market about a patent or, let's just say a drug, is encapsulated within one company and with a management normally of that company and a couple of researchers, even within the company, people don't share data about it because it could leak. And there's this big, kind of this big fear that, oh, we lose our data, we lose some of the IP.

And if the open source software space has proven anything, and I think blockchain in that sense and the cryptocurrency space has proven so much around that is that you can go much further in old. open source environments where people can collaboratively develop something together. Like the speed of innovation can be significantly faster. And the way that patents work today goes completely counter that. And so what Talo was explaining is what we essentially began working on were ways where large group of people could coordinate or a large group of stakeholders could coordinate more publicly around IP ownership. And those are really the early days of thinking around VDASA.

So let's say if you take longevity therapeutics that are being developed and you develop them in the public, through public ownership through democratic ownership, what would that do to access around that drug ultimately? What would it do to the speed of research for people to really operate much more publicly about them while still trying to protect the intellectual property around them? I'm kind of struggling to understand how that would straddle the divide between basically developing. a public good and at the same time still being able to make a profit off of it because you don't want to turn this into a not-for-profit area of humankind right so basically you still want people to be able to make money off of innovations so how is that kind of an oxymoron in itself does this kind of go together definitely i mean it's super challenging right so i mean it's

And this is, and the way that we've sort of approached this. So I think this is an intractable problem with humanity, which is the sort of greed problem. And I don't think greed is something that you can fully eliminate as, maybe that sounds fatalistic, but I just, yeah, I think that it will always sort of exist. And that when you design a system, an incentive base system, you need to have those sort of factors in mind. So there will always be some number of people who are interested in, let's say doing the most altruistic thing, and there will always be some number of people who are probably interested in, let's say, the greediest thing. And people fall along the spectrum. It's not necessarily right or wrong. It's just that people have different motivations for doing things.

And then so if you ask yourself from a design perspective, how do you optimize this equation? For me, the sort of logical thing is to have the stakeholders that have the sort of most, let's say, altruistic, if you want to optimize for altruism, you have the stakeholders that have the most, let's say, inherently altruistic persona being the benefactors of the system and to make more sense of that, how would a diabetic actually price insulin, right? So if the group that is actually owning the intellectual property and making decisions around it and governing it is relatively close from a, let's say, you know, maybe the end users of that. drug, they will probably behave differently than a pharmaceutical company would.

Right. So a lot of the thesis is around if you distribute IP ownership and governance to the right stakeholders that are motivated by the right things, they will probably reach a balance between profit motive and public good that looks quite different from a publicly traded company or from a, you know, from a stakeholder that's optimizing for revenue. So a lot of our early thesis was around, like, I mean, I, we spent a lot of time thinking, like, how could you change incentives in drug development very broadly? How could you get people to be less, because, you know, pharmaceutical companies aren't inherently evil. It's not, there's not one guy sitting behind a desk saying, like, how do we screw over patients and make money? These are just the growing pains and the developments of any

company that has an obligation to shareholders, right? You need to, you need to grow, you need to show that you're, you know, you want your drugs to be blockbusters or whatever. And so inherently, what sort of happens is these things get bastardized by revenue mechanics. But if, if, for example, if you had a drug and that drug was now, the patent around that drug was collectively owned by patients or patient advocacy groups, they would probably end up trying to figure out, well, you know, maybe the drug should be profitable enough that we can continue funding further research in the field that you can create a sustainable business model. But they would also be probably very sensitive to things like pricing and access, right? If I'm a patient personally, I'm probably

going to have the empathy that comes with being a patient and wanting to be incentivized to price something a certain way. And so this is this is the design thinking that we're currently at. And with aging, obviously everyone is sort of a patient. This touches everyone. But if we build a really strong community in Vita Dow of researchers, of enthusiasts, of people who have been thinking about aging for a long time, you know, the type of people who maybe spend five hours a day on the longevity subreddit, even, or, you know, people who are really passionate about this, the way that they sort of govern intellectual property is probably going to be somewhat different from someone who's doing this as a purely venture capital play or something like this.

And so, yeah, the engineering sort of happens on the community side as opposed to on the, let's say, the intellectual property side even. It's almost like, I feel it's two different visions, right? So Paul came in and he weighed in on like, okay, once you make the ownership of intellect to the property open source and there's an information market. And he mentioned that then people. would produce information about the drug and the price of that

patent would indicate how good that drug is expected to be. I tend to see that as a very you know like cut-throat rational market where you know like the owners are extremely selfish and the people trading on the price

of this information of this intellectual property are like all selfish and like we are kind of using the selfishness of all of them to extract information about the drug in a public forum. Whereas with Tyler, with your, with what you said, it almost feels like, so with like Paul's vision, I felt, okay, we open source, you open source intellectual property and then you use

the selfishness of all of these market participants to extract information on the drug. Whereas in, in what you were saying, it's more like you open source the ownership of this IP and then you give this ownership to patient groups, and these patient groups or patient group DAOs will behave more altruistically. Is it only me, but do you see that, like, that these feel like to mutually contradictory visions in some way? No, definitely.

I mean, so I think Paul and I also approach this from two slightly different angles, and what we tend to get is something in the middle, but I think that they're both, like, the way, I don't know for sure what the outcome of either of those experiments would be. And they're closely related. One is just, you know, in the version that I was describing, you're having some control over who the stakeholders would be, right?

So you're very consciously going to certain parties and providing them with access. And I think in the example that Paul's using, you know, maybe that step of regulation in a way is non-existent. And you're really incentivizing more from like, you know, the same. way a stock market would. I think Paul and I are an interesting team and a good team because we come at this problem from two different sides and tend to arrive somewhere in the middle between both. But no, you're certainly right. I think a lot of the formation of molecule and also Vita Dell and the thing has been out of debates as founders in terms of what the right sort of design thinking

would look like. And I think what we've both arrived at is that what we want to create is a lot of experimentation where the, you know, we can sort of iterate and create proof of concepts, things like Vita Dow, for example, where there's a certain design space and a certain mechanism applied. And through that, there's a bunch of learnings that we could then iterate on further and that sort of define how the vision advances and how the space advances. But I think it's, yeah, we think about this in slightly different ways that I personally think complement each other. And I think probably move us both sort of either, you know, towards the other in a way. I fully want to echo what Tyler said.

And Meja, you picked that up really well. And I think it describes what Tyler described as intractable. So an intractable issue of like how humanity and also how markets work. So I described it from a very market-centric perspective, where Tyler described it from a very patient-centric perspective. ultimately what we're building is a form of a protocol of how to how to manage and bring these assets to patients. And that can take very different forms. So even Vita Dow as a marketplace could decide to spin off individual assets that it's funded and then let market participants, as you said, kind of like freely invest and divest into them.

In another form, what Tyler described is I could, for example, form a patient collective as a DAO. and what we do is we convince researchers to bring, to kind of, to let us find their assets, because we promise those researchers that their research will never be commercialized in X or Y way, that it will never be priced in X or Y way, and that might convince the researchers. So it's really only setting the rules of the game on an individual asset basis, but you can play the game in very different ways. And I think, I mean, I think it's something that makes crypto really exciting as a kind of as a playing field, because there's so many different people that are designing tokens in different ways.

And in the same way, I think we want to bring that programmability of markets into the direct development space. Yeah. And this is definitely speaking with like our molecule hats on as opposed to the sort of Vita-Dal hats, which I think is playing in a somewhat specific design space in a specific way. But I think, you know, we've also, because of molecule, we've spent some years thinking about like, what are the different designs and incentive schemes that you could create that would incentivize participants to behave in a certain way and what sort of outcomes would those drive? You've talked about molecule and Vita Dow. Let's maybe clear that up. So basically, Vita Dow is the

Dow that raised funds and that kind of allocates resources. And what's molecules role? If we think about Vida-Dau, we have to kind of understand or think through how Vita-Dou can actually interact with the real world and hold real world IP. And so what we've been working on is molecule for quite a while is like, how do we bridge the gap between the real world research and patents and intellectual property, which is where value resides in the current biotech and pharmaceutical system. So a biotech company, in the early stage biotech startup normally has a few assets that they've patented or maybe they even, it's pre-IP.

And that forms the core value of a biotech company. If one biotea company, like if a pharma company acquies a biotea company, they're normally acquiring it for a portfolio of IP that they hold. And drugs, if we think of drugs or therapeutics as they travel through this long pharmaceutical development process, it's typically two core assets. It's IP and data. And in the early stages, they can even be the same thing. So IP can be having a data set on a particular compound that proves that that particular compound can, can, has an effect on a specific indication. And so now is the question,

how do you bring that into the transient ethereal world of Web 3? And you can do that as data. So for example, Vida-Dar can hold data sets and it can acquire data sets. But if it does that in a fully open source way, like the real world might not recognize that VDAR holds these assets. It might be very difficult for anyone to kind of, to acquire that from Vida-Dar. And so what we worked on for a long time with molecule is attaching IP

intellectual property rights to non-fungible tokens. So I started scheming on that idea. There's early articles where I compare crypto-kitties to molecules. And I think like, actually, I first presented that at DAPCon, I think, Ritchina Frederiki also co-hosted at the time. And, okay, so first thought is attaching IP to NFTs to make them travel into the world of Web3 and make them transactable and Web3. And so the role of molecule really is to help Vita Dow acquire, acquire IPTs,

as an and hold it on chain as Vida-Dao in the same way for example that you can imagine Flamingo Dow which is actually an inspiration and inspiration to us essentially building a portfolio of of NFT artworks and being able to acquire and fund the work of those artists as a collective and so in the very same vein Vida-Dau is is acquiring and funding research specifically early stage research of longevity researchers and biotech company across the world and holding them on-chain as IP NFTs. And that's kind of a framework that molecules help pioneer. And so our core role at molecule is to really help get these assets into on-chain structures

that can now help finance them. In a very simple way, you could look at molecule as an open-sea for biotech IP, and that then helps form patient collectives that can actually own and fund the research around them. Then the next thought is, well, okay, you essentially you need something that is aching to a biotech company to make these assets productive. And so Vida-Dan has managed to attract a large community of researchers,

of longevity, VCs, of industry experts that are now actively scanning the globe and scanning universities for potential research. assets that it could acquire or that it could co-fund and actually own the real world IP around them. And so then VitaDar starts funding the studies and receiving the data that results from these studies. And the data is now analyzed as a collective. In a semi-open source way, there's obviously always issues with IP. You don't want to leak the IP, but you want to be able to analyze it as a collective. And it's not that different than actually than some companies would function if they

were doing research. If you have a company, you normally outsource a lot of the clinical development work or the pre-clinical work. You then receive data sets from whoever produced the data from you, whichever lab, and then you analyze it and you make decisions on, do we go this way, do we go this way, do we go this way? And based on that, you then develop further IP strategies. And so in Vida-Dau's case, it then holds these IPNFTs that often represent sub-licenses of real-world research. we work with IP law firms and partner attorneys to make sure that it's packaged in a way that is fully industry compliant. And so Vida-Dar then in the next step could decide to sell that asset on to another buyer. It could also, so let's say with asset, I really mean a research project.

So for example, with the University of Copenhagen and the Shabin-Nudson Aging Research Laboratory, we have a first project that is being attached to an NFT. Tyler can probably share a little bit more about the project just now. And so then a first set of studies kick off. And if any of the compounds in that study are ahead, Vita Dow can then go on and begin patenting more and more of these compounds and essentially building a mini IP strategy around them. And then it could decide to create a sub-market for any of these things

and kind of allow more people from the public to become contributors in that market. or it could decide to simply sell it to another buyer, which is really how a lot of early stage drug development works. It's like assets typically pass from company to company until they make it to market. So we currently don't actually anticipate that a structure like Vidao could, like, let's say, take a drug all the way to market and actually begin like selling that or commercializing it.

It's unlikely, I think, that in the next two to three years, you would find, you would go to pharmacy and see like a little Bida-Dau logo on a packet of longevity drugs. But what I think is very likely that through this collective that Vita-Dau is building, that it will make very sound funding decisions. And those funding decisions could result in very valuable IP findings. And then Vita-Dau as a community can decide essentially what to do with them. It could decide to commercialize them. It could also decide to open-source them and turn them into generics, if that's what the community wanted. It could even be, this is like an extreme example that I once made, that let's say B-Dar now makes a discovery that could

extend human life by like 500 years and then decides, actually, this should never reach humanity or patients and let's destroy the IP. So as a DAO and as a governance vehicle, all those options are fully open to the community of Vita holders. Maybe just one other. So I mean, I think as slightly more or just a simpler way to think about it is that molecule is basically creating the technical and legal frameworks that allow DAO's to hold intellectual property on chain and is basically also creating a.

rulebook on how these DAOs can sort of operate and function. And the long-term hope with something like molecule is that we go on to enable the creation of many different DAOs in many different therapeutic areas and sort of serve in some ways an impetus for this biotech DAW revolution that we hope really comes into existence over the next years with different design iterations and different flavors and different incentive mechanics. Yeah, Vita Dow in some ways from my perspective is one of the first really proof of concepts for the technology that molecule has been building to sort of allow DALs to actually hold and interact with intellectual property and have these sort of novel governance mechanisms that allow a broad community to form around this and then govern how it comes

to market. Could you actually take the example you mentioned from the University of Copenhagen Nutson Lab and like go over what is exactly funded and the kinds of chemicals that are could result and how it was translated into IP and the entire value chain to clarify how molecule and Rita Dow work together? Absolutely. So molecule has been interacting with the Shabai Nutsin laboratory for the better part of two years. So Morton Shabai Nutsin was a scientist that I really admired during my time at the National Institute on aging.

So he was a postdoc. He's an MD PhD and he was a postdoc actually at the same time that I was at the National Institute on Aging. And he was sort of one of the, I think you could say one of the star postdoc. So he was doing amazing work. He was really, really innovative. He was a young scientist who had some experience creating a number of really innovative companies as well. He created something called MidoDB, which is basically a website to predict the likelihood that an unknown disorder or rare conditioning had some level of mitochondrial. involvement. So he was always an up-and-coming person in the space whose work I really admired. And when

we started building molecule, I was in touch with Morton fairly frequently about some of the ideas that we were having. He was always very supportive. And I think, yeah, we talked for a long time about hopefully figuring out some way to support some of the work that he was doing primarily because he had this one project that, you know, we've been really excited about where over the past couple of years, received exclusive access to the Danish healthcare systems prescription and health database records that go back, I believe, about 40 years. So he has 40 years of data on the Danish, on basically the Danish population. I believe it's roughly 3.5 billion data points covering something like 5 million individuals on 3,600 different medications. And he has a machine learning and AI

component to his laboratory that's been doing analysis on these data sets for some time, trying to figure out if there were certain drugs that have been prescribed longitudinally that appear to have a positive impact on lifespan. So in a way, similar to Metformin. And so what he found was in the context of this database, and when the data was analyzed and controlled for certain factors, he found that there were about 100 therapeutics that given longitudinally, or or let's say that met certain criteria had a positive impact on lifespan. And about 10 of those seemed to have quite a significant impact on lifespan. So something in the five to eight year additional years of life,

which is quite significant from a human perspective. And so he's basically doing this sort of reverse engineering from a bunch of human data around drugs that are already FDA approved and looking at how some number of those compounds. so we're looking at about 10, could be repurposed for longevity. And what's particularly interesting is that these are not therapeutics that have been classically described in the literature to be targeting longevity. So it's not your sort of metformin.

There's some things in this data set that are extremely novel and where the actual biochemical pathway that's probably responsible for driving longevity could actually be optimized in the context of a, let's say, either, employing some medicinal chemistry or creating an analog that fully focused on the off-target effects of these drugs. So some of them are really surprising. So it's sort of an example of a longevity drug development platform almost where we have a bunch of drugs where we have a lot of clinical data. We know these drugs are safe. We know they've been given for quite a long time. Some are on-patent, some are off-patent. And also from a mechanistic perspective,

the way that some of these drugs are working in terms of what they're typically prescribed for is probably not the thing that is actually providing longevity benefits. So we were speaking to Morton about this for, you know, quite a long time. He had presented this project at various conferences and also to the Foresight Institute. And, you know, we got to the point where we were, our design thinking had really advanced in terms of, you know, we felt this sort of, the timing was right in the sort of, you know, the NFT space had really evolved. our thinking around the legal and technical framework for Vita Dahl was sort of maturing. We decided that we were going to try to bring a community together to build this DAL. And yeah, Morton was one of the first people that we reached out to where we were like,

this is a prime first project for DAL. Everything sort of lines up. And Morton is also a scientist who is like, he's just very forward thinking. For him, it was really exciting that there would be a community behind this. He wants to give updates once the funding actually begins. He wants to be giving updates every week to the Dow. He really likes the idea that maybe the community could have ideas on how to drive this project. He really likes the idea of working publicly.

So the other thing that we are looking for in terms of a first sort of, let's say, use case for what Vida Dow could fund was also someone that is sort of fully aligned with the vision, mission, ethos of the Dow. and this idea of doing things more publicly. So then the process actually became of like, okay, that's great. Morton's on board. Hooray. How do we now convince like the university and everyone around this from a legal perspective that like this is something that makes sense and that we can do? And to be honest, like, yeah, this is something that we preempted quite a bit.

So I mean, you were in conversations with the TTO before Bita Dow even existed. We knew that this process, especially with, you know, You know, the first one is always going to be the most difficult. As soon as there's a precedent and other universities see that this is something that can be done, I think it's the risk profile changes completely. But, yeah, it took a lot of conversations back and forth, a lot of convincing, a lot of trust building, a lot of, like, you know, I presented at multiple conferences in Denmark and sort of chatting to various people and trying to, yeah, have different lawyers explaining what this is.

It's one thing if you're crypto-native to explain what a Dow is. I think it's another thing if you don't even really follow like what Bitcoin or Ethereum is, which I mean, yeah, in academia, you can't go in with the expectation that everyone has a really deep understanding of all these things. Yeah, Paul, did you want to say something? I mean, interestingly, really since over the past six months, also since we started Vita Da, there's been an enormous push in academia on NFTs. So we were just recently, I think about a week ago, we presented to an organization called AUTM,

which is really the largest tech transfer, university tech transfer organization in the United States that are very actively looking into the use of NFTs as a part of university technology tech transfer. I think there was a case where UC Berkeley recently kind of sold in NFT representing or like sold multiple NFTs representing some of their earliest discoveries that were made at the university more as in kind of as an artwork representing the the the first I think

the first pages describing those discoveries or even I think the submissions to the to the patent office yeah patent disclosure forms yeah the patent disclosure forms um but interestingly there's been a huge push and also I mean this it's interesting this always coincides with rising crypto prices suddenly people are like, oh, so it might actually work. And so I think that, yeah, I think I think the recent market developments and the adoption of NFTs have helped enormously because at this point, also the universities that we get in touch with or even those that reach out. So Vita Daan has really managed to attract.

On some days, I check into the Discord and there's like two or three researchers from universities across the globe, many in the U.S., many in Europe, as I'm also in Asia that have just introduced themselves on a daily basis in the Vita. Dow introductions, kind of Vita Dow introductions channel. And so just, yeah, recently in conversations, I think it's gotten a lot easier to kind of convince people and institutions and organizations of these new models. And yeah, it's really at a point where, I mean, Vita Dau has had several conversations with biotech companies that are willing to, like, or interested in attaching royalty rights

and some of their lead compounds to NFTs. And this comes back again, actually to the, yeah, to the more market-driven approach, where they're like, hmm, wait, so we could take a couple of our lead assets, we could allow people to purchase stake in those assets, essentially also valuing them, which might be interesting for our own valuation, or we could raise financing by selling stakes in our assets. And this is something that is typically done quite far ahead in kind of the pharmaceutical development process,

when an asset is quite close to market or maybe in stage two, stage one, stage two trials, you'll have big pharma companies coming in and saying, cool, we'll purchase 40% of the future sales or future role, loyalty rights in your asset and will finance them according to the following milestones. And now you can essentially kind of give these options to the public, which is actually also really interesting to start-up. So I found in terms of adoption, both startups and institutions are really actively, or like getting quite open to these ideas because there's been so much grace in other fields.

Even like this example of the Nets and Laboratory, if I understand it right, The thing that is being traded on the blockchain is not actually a patent, but the expectation of a patent. So the way I understood the example that Tyler gave is. So this lab, it has identified 10 chemicals. Let's call them A1, A2, A3, A4, up to A10. These 10 chemicals are historically known to have an extent lifespan or have an impact on lifespan based on the Danish data set. And what the professor and the lab is saying essentially is you have A1, A2 up to A10. But if you think of A1, maybe there are analogs B1, C1, and a D1 of A1 in which we have kind of accentuated the lifespan

extending effect and design B1, C1, D1, they are analogs, they are similar to A1, but they are not A1, they are compound similar to A1. And because they're similar to A1 but not A1, they can still be patented. And we can preserve the lifespan expanding property of A1 in this terms, hopefully. So basically our project could create like these three analogs,

but not just three analogs of A1, but like analogs of B, analogs of C1 and logs of D1. So we could come up, end up coming out with a portfolio of less 15 or 20 different drugs and patents where we have drugs that could have a good effect on lifespan. And as I as far as I understand it, this lab hasn't found these analog drugs yet. But their research could produce these analog drugs and analog patents.

So there's an expectation of IP being produced. and that expectation is what you are tokenizing as an NFT and trading it on the Ethereum blockchain. Is that right? Yes. So basically what happens is the Vita Dow creates what's called a, you could sort of think about it as like a contract research agreement or a reverse contract research agreement with the university

where the resulting, there's a number of experiments that are going to be conducted. The first are actually just testing all of these compounds that were initially identified, these FDA approved therapeutics. in human cells and in fruit flies, looking at different markers to basically understand the mechanism of action that could be extending lifespan. And even from that, if there's a novel finding, so if you can identify that specific pathway, there's intellectual property there and a patent might be filed, even before you do med cam or create another analog. And basically, what Vita Dell owns is a sub license for any of the IP that results from this set of predefined experiments. So in this case, what happens is that that sub-license for basically a future promise to intellectual property resulting from these series of experiments that Vida-DOW is funding are attached to an NFT and that is held by the Dow. And then when that data is created, that data is transferred to the Dow and held by the Dow and the Dow can file for intellectual property with a laboratory around any of, you know, there's the patent.

pathway is pretty diverse. It's not necessarily that, oh, we have a, you know, a drug here. It could be a method of use. It could be a formulation. It could be an analog compound, as you're saying. It could be some combination of drugs. But basically any of the IP that results from these studies, we to Dow will have basically a right to. And this is really interesting and really novel for a few reasons. But, you know, a lot of what's focused on currently, if you, if you're a pharmaceutical company or if you're a biotech company and you want to go out and you want to acquire assets or you want to outlicense something, you would basically go to tech transfer offices and see what's available, what technologies are available. Typically the patent clock is already ticking. And so if assets are

more than like two or three years old, they're typically not very attractive for out licensing because from a commercial perspective, you're losing quite a lot of time on how much you would be able to recruit from like a market exclusivity perspective. What's interesting with this model is that it basically allows Vita Dau to go to researchers at universities all over the world, figure out who's working on what's and what might be interesting for Vita Dada Fund. And then basically engage in these agreements

where the lab can basically get funding from the DAL, begin doing work and work with the DOW to sort of determine when is the right time to file for IP, get feedback on sort of what experiments would be interesting to do, also feedback from the community. And beyond the actual IP, sort of, let's say, filing Peyton, one of the things that we're looking at from a technical implementation perspective is also that the NFT could actually just be used as sort of a key for a federated data storage,

or like basically, basically you can have the academic institution just uploading all of the data that's resulting from this project to a sort of data storage layer that would only be unlocked by that NFT. And then you get into another interesting question, which is if you have a mechanism to protect this data and you have a funding mechanism that's actually producing, let's say, this data with the laboratory, do you definitely even need a patent? If you have this federated data storage that has everything that you would need to be able to file for intellectual property or, let's say, you know, actually move a drug along to market, all of a sudden the blockchain itself and this NFT sort of key that unlocks this layer can

become like a sort of a proof of prior art. It can become an access mechanism. And so we're really interested to see over time if there are ways to actually begin to generate real value around this data, even without necessarily falling into the confines of the regular patent system. But yeah, maybe Paul, do you want to speak a little bit more to that? I know you've been thinking a lot about that sort of technical implementation. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that this might trigger, so the federated data storage part that the time mentioned. So at first, maybe to just reiterate what you said may as essentially the NFT represents a real world legal contract. That is, but that is countersigned by Vita Dow as the,

as the real world IP holder through a sub licensing agreement. So that is at first step attached to this NFT. And then comes into full ownership of Vita Dao. There's a sale agreement between the buyer and the seller of like, cool, we're now buying this and we're going to finance research around it. And then the financing part starts. And that starts producing. reducing data. And so the NFT in the same vein can also be used to unlock a federated, let's say, data storage. It's almost like using the NFT to unlock a Google Drive, just that it's not a Google Drive. It's federated data storage that stays on site of the university, which helps get, like, helps ease up a lot of the data privacy concerns that you typically find in Europe and the university wanting to also

keep the data on site, if it's sensitive data. And now only the university and the holder of the NFT can unlock that federated data storage. And the asset keeps going in value as the data is analyzed, but no one except the NFT holder can leak the data or the university could leak the data, and both would contravene their legal agreements that are also tied to the NFT. That NFT could easily be sold on. And in the real world today, that's one of the key reasons why you want to patent early on, because there's a super high risk of leaking data as soon as you should start sharing it with more participants. I think the real reason. I think the rules of that game still need to be determined.

But personally, I find it extremely interesting that with a growing data set, almost like making the NFT data rich or making the project data rich, obviously increases its potential value. And that can have been passed on from participant to participant. And it could, yeah, it could really alleviate some of the pressures, especially that researchers and universities have around getting their research funded and essentially being able to transact in it. Yeah.

This is a super fascinating discussion. I kind of want to cut it short at this point. I have one more question that's been on my mind for a long time now. So how does the DAO actually make decisions? I understand that basically you can buy Vita tokens from the DAO in the initial token sale and then you can vote with them. But you don't need any special skills or knowledge to be a Vita token. holder, right? So why do you think the Vita token holders are equipped to actually make all of these

decisions? Yeah. So there's, I mean, there's a few points of sort of, I guess you could call them almost checks and balances that exist within the Dow and that were created with the initial structure of the Dow. So you have the sort of members and the token holders, which ultimately vote on the proposals that end up on chain. But you also have a series of working groups that cover different sort of, let's say, departments, if you will, within the Dow. These are things like governance, tokenomics, operations. And the most critical one for the mission of the Dow is the longevity working group. And the longevity working group consists of at this point about 30 or so, physicians, scientists, MD PhDs, professors, thought leaders in the field, number of people who

are deeply credentialed within the aging space, domain specific experts. And the goal of these working groups is basically to serve the interests of token holders and to serve the interest of the longevity field. And by doing that, they can provide a number of different functions. The most basic function that the longevity working group provides is educating members of the Dow and the community around what aging is, how it works, what are the sort of interesting things that are happening from an educational perspective, sharing papers, we do a journal club, et cetera.

And then the more sort of specific functions that it actually, the things that it serves to, let's say, improve from the perspective of the Dow is how assets are found, evaluated, and due diligence. So this longevity working group is actually the group that's going out, speaking to universities, identifying projects, and working on a sort of day-to-day basis to ensure that there's quality deal flow coming into Vita Dow and that the projects that are coming in are quite interesting. And then if there's a funding proposal for a specific project, what will happen is basically the working group will make recommendations to the community for projects that it thinks should be funded and can go on chain. At the end of the day, it's up to the token holders to vote on a specific project and to make the final decision. But these working groups serve as a layer of, let's say, advice and guidance to help anyone, make decisions around what should be funded and what shouldn't be funded. Because as you know, it takes a lot of domain expertise in the context of biotech to really have a good idea around

what a good project is and what should be funded. So how do I get into the working group and how do you make sure that they can't act maliciously, right? I mean, in principle, they could be infiltrated by legacy farmer companies or something. Maybe I have my crypto head on too much. But, it feels like this is definitely a vulnerability, right? Absolutely. I mean, so it's built on a system of trust to a certain extent. So that vulnerability will always exist to some extent. But it's basically the working group itself and the working group Stewart,

so the person who sort of takes the lead in an individual working group are responsible for vetting applicants. The applicants are reviewed across a number of criteria. They have, this is not super typical. crypto where everyone is anonymous and no one's identities are, you know, in this case, everyone's identities are known. People have formal interviews. It would be relatively difficult to get into the working group, let's say, is like a Pfizer executive undercover without people knowing. So there are some sort of, let's say, very basal identity protections and things like that.

And then people can also be removed from the working group. So I mean, if the group collectively feels that there's a member that is not contributing or that is creating problems. There's also mechanisms for off-boarding people. But it is this sort of truly decentralized. There's not like, at the end of the day, it's a community decision to let someone in or to remove someone from the working group. So there will always sort of be some level of vulnerability. Is there a plan to introduce reputation into the system? Because it feels like that could probably make it more robust? Yes, definitely.

So we're actively looking at our reputation system. Vida is still relatively fresh in it's like on-chain as an on-chain life form. We've actually just had the first couple of proposals that passed. I think actually the Shiber Nutson proposal that we just spoke about is about to go live and can be voted on by the community. I think there's several other proposals for like to fund other projects that are already going live. The other form of that I think we'll actively explore over time just in terms of making governance more efficient as delegation.

So being able to delegate to certain people in the group. So for example, if there's a researcher, so we have lots of well-known researchers out of the longevity space that have joined Vita Dau, or even, let's say, we've had several VCs that have joined. And if they're a part of the working group, or if they're, let's say, a larger token, although I can say, cool,

I really like the way that this person is making decisions. I will delegate my vote to them. I like what they're funding. This is going to be good. We haven't really seen any contentious decisions yet. So I think does it operate by consensus as opposed to dissent? The dissent are quite effective. And you should really only put large governance decisions up to vote that are maybe contentious.

So you don't want to vote on a whole bunch of things where everyone's saying, yes, let's go ahead. Yes, let's go ahead. Those things should almost like start working automatically through these working groups. So far, that's proven very, yeah, very efficient. And then all kind of all decisions that are made within Vita Da that concern kind of the Vita token, kind of the treasury that Vita manages, the funds that it raised, all of those decisions, anything that moves stuff around on chain should really be put up to vote to Vita token holders. Cool.

Thank you so much, Paul and Tyler. So basically, we'll put together the show notes and you can send us materials that you think we should include because I think a lot of people will be interested in the state of the research and how to access Vita Dow. I assume the best way to get in touch with you guys is on your Discord. Yes, that's right. Cool. We'll also link to that then. I am super excited to see where this is going to go and how long I will be able to be able to.

you know, follow this along, whether, you know, it be it for the next 100 years or 150 years. I don't know. So all the best of luck to you guys. And I hope that, I mean, this is such a big topic. Meher and I, we've kind of picked on a couple of areas where we felt it was still a little bit inconsistent in the vision. But I mean, obviously the, the goal is so large and worthy. I'm super excited for this for this project and it was a pleasure to have both of you on yeah thank you so much thank you so much it's been an absolute yeah pleasure being on the on the show and uh yeah hope to listen to many many many more episodes of epicenter i think i've been i've been tuning in since episode 20 or 25 so wishing both of you a lot of longevity and and and and to the show of course yeah thank you so much

it was an absolute pleasure to speak with both of you and and great questions Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen.

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