VitaDAO is excited to announce The Longevity Prize in collaboration with Foresight Institute

A series of prizes to honor and accelerate progress in longevity and rejuvenation.‍

The longevity ecosystem is growing rapidly. But the problem is vast and we’re running out of time. The longevity prize encourages novel approaches for turning back our aging clocks.‍

You may be familiar with standard prize models that set a fixed amount to target a specific scientific goal with exact criteria. Those are great!‍

This prize series is different. Its aim is to generate an avalanche of proposals, experiments, and collaborations on undervalued areas.‍

This can include smaller bets growing into larger sums, innovating with novel prize voting mechanisms, or even a series of workshops or hackathons to develop promising ideas.‍

Common to all these prize experiments is their goal to support a growing longevity ecosystem, connecting those who generate proposals for progress with those who want to help execute them, and drive high-trust collaboration toward solving them.‍

We love to collaborate. The first round of $180k in prizes was fundraised through Gitcoin, supported by community members, whose donations were matched by VitaDAO, Vitalik Buterin and Stefan George.Thank you for your generous support! If you have an idea for a prize you’d like to sponsor, we’d love to hear from you!

Together with our judges, we are excited to announce our first round of prizes, the Hypothesis Prize:

Hypothesis Prize to be given for best proposal for undervalued and non-obvious prizes in the longevity space:

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One key problem with the prize model is that academics and biotechs will only perform experiments when they have the money in the bank. That’s why our first round of prizes will be given out for hypothesis-generation to define the second round of larger prizes.

You can achieve a lot by reading the literature — over a century of all the world’s biological knowledge is available to anyone. There are cases where key discoveries are made in the past, but forgotten for long periods of time — only to be rediscovered.

We would like to hear from you: what is the most promising but under-appreciated area of geroscience and LongBio that we should pursue? Review the literature (and you’re welcome to include your own unpublished data), explain why this area is undervalued, generate a hypothesis for making progress, and propose an experiment to further investigate this approach. The more concrete, e.g. including people, resources, and time required for next steps, the better.

‍Proposal length limit: A 1-pager would be great, 3-pages maximum.‍

Who can apply: No need to be a bench scientist or PI to apply — anyone can submit a proposal.‍

Prize incentives: Up to $20k for this round! Finalists will be invited to present their proposal to the judges. Excellent proposals will be moved to the next phase, where they will be eligible for follow-on funding.‍

Apply: You can find examples of the prizes and information on how to apply on the prize website: https://longevityprize.com/

Prize deadline: End of 2022‍

We are excited to be supported by an excellent panel of judges:

• Alexandra Stolzing (Loughborough University)
• Brian Kennedy (Buck Institute)
• Celine Halioua (Loyal)
• Christine Peterson (Foresight Institute)
• Daniel Ives (Shift BioSciences)
• David Furman (Buck Institute)
• Eleanor Sheekey (Sheekey Science, Cambridge)
• Joe Betts-Lacroix (Retro)
• Jose Luis Ricon (Rejuverome)
• Jean-Hebert (Albert Einstein School of Medicine)
• Jamie Justice (Wake Forest School of Medicine)
• Karl Pfleger (Agingbiotech.info)
• Michael Snyder (Stanford University)
• Nathan Cheng (On Deck Longevity Biotech)
• Nir Barzilai (Albert Einstein School of Medicine)
• Petr Sramek (Longevity Tech Fund)
• Reason (FightAging)
• Sebastian Brunemeier (ImmuneAGE & Healthspan Capital)
• Sonia Arrison (100 Plus)
• Tim Peterson (WashU, VitaDAO, Healthspan Tech)
• Tyler Golato (VitaDAO, Molecule)
• Vadim Gladyshev (Harvard University)‍

Questions: Please contact your prize Co-Initiators:

• VitaDAO: Vincent Weisser, Cat-Thu Nguyen-Huu, Sebastian Brunemeier, Tim Peterson, Tyler Golato,
• Foresight Institute, a non-profit institute to support ambitious science and technology development in longevity, molecular machines, neurotech, space, and computing. Contact Aaron King, Research Director, to learn more.