VitaDAO Letter: Vita NFTs, upgrading VitaDAO’s Governance & More!
Inside this Newsletter:
- Funding cutting edge Longevity Research with Art
- A VitaDAO x JellyFishDAO Media Collaboration
- Governance Proposals: Taking the Working Group Structure to the next level
- Meet DAO Member: PhD Maria Marinova
Upcoming Events
IP-NFT Transfer Ceremony with Molecule & BIOIO: December 14th at 1 PM EST- Celebrate VitaDAO’s sixth longevity research project funded via IP-NFT! Join the public IP-NFT Ceremony for BIOIO, streamed on Youtube.
Onboarding AMA: December 21st at 12 PM EST- Swing by a VitaDAO onboarding session! Here, you can ask questions about VitaDAO, meet others interested in the DAO, and learn about VitaDAO’s working groups.
Hackathon: 13–15th Jan and 20–22- Join VitaDAO’s Hackathon, a remote, cross-disciplinary hackathon focusing on the future of longevity. Registration is now open!
VitaDAO @ Longevity Med Summit — May 4–5, 2023- Come join VitaDAO in sunny Lisbon, Portugal at the 2023 Longevity Med Summit. Here, join other longevity enthusiasts, in learning about the development of anti-aging science, the exploration of new regenerative and longevity therapeutics, and the limiting R&D challenges faced in therapy development.
DAO News
Spreading the Word (on Longevity)
VitaDAO is collaborating with JellyfishDAO on an interview series on neuroscience. JellyfishDAO is a community formed around anti-aging and spread longevity awareness through movies, documentaries, games, and other media styles. In this collab, VitaDAO and JellyfishDAO interviewed renowned neuroscientist Jean Hebert and Shift Bioscience CEO and founder, Daniel Ives. Interested? Watch neuroscientist Jean Hebert discuss the power movies and media have on impacting public perception of longevity.
The Need for “Synthetic Vitality”
“Understanding that it is factors that synergize to cause us to die will be key to fixing how we make therapies.” Professor Tim Peterson highlights the need for synergistic therapies to promote longevity.
Read more about what we can learn from the anti-cancer community’s “synthetic lethality” mindset in VitaDAO’s most recent article: “Synthetic Vitality: Synergist therapies for longevity.”
Vita Governance
Fundraising for Longevity Research with NFT-Art
With the passing of VDP-64, VitaDAO is creating a Nouns-style NFT project to fundraise for longevity research. The VitaDAO community provided support to commit up to $13k to develop this project, with all proceeds going to fund longevity research. This project explores new ways VitaDAO can accomplish its ultimate goal, funding as much viable longevity research as possible. Vita NFT holders will have special VitaDAO community perks (specifics are still to be decided on). Interested in holding a VitaNFT? Stay tuned for Spring 2023.
Upgrading VitaDAO Working Groups
Since VitaDAO’s inception we’ve had a lot of insights and great feedback. As a result of some reflection, senior DAO members have proposed to upgrade working group structures and governance. Ultimately the goal of these upgrades is to further support DAO execution and continue the Vita Success story with an expanded team. This proposal is currently live on Snapshot (as of 12/10/22).
Proposed changes include:
- Unifying the Legal, Governance, Tech, and Tokenomics Working Groups into Squads, to coordinate with the “Longevity Dealflow” and “Community & Awareness” Working Groups
- Formation of a specialized fundraising squad
- Expanded marketing squad within the Awareness Working Group to support ongoing outreach in the broader Web3 and DeSci.
Live on the Vita Governance Forum — discuss and vote!
Find all of VitaDAO’s pending live proposals on Discourse, VitaDAO’s governance hub for proposals before they are moved on-chain. These proposals are open for engagement, voting, questions, and conversation!
VDP-63: Anticancer and Pro-longevity Effects of High Molecular Weight Hyaluronic Acid
Naked mole rats are long-lived rodents with a lifespan of up to 40 years, compared to normal rats which live about 3 years. Previous research has demonstrated cancer resistance in naked mole rats is modulated by the abundance of hyaluronic acid in tissues. To increase hyaluronic acid in humans and translate these findings into the clinic, this project requests 300k USD to screen and develop small molecule inhibitors of hyaluronidases, the enzymes that break down hyaluronic acid. These compounds are expected to increase human healthspan and lifespan.
VDP-65: Delegated Voting
VDP-65 proposes allowing token holders of VITA to delegate voting rights to a delegate and wallet of their choice to vote on their behalf. For those VITA token holders who do not have the time necessary to actively participate in the evaluation of the research proposals, delegating one’s voting power could offer an alternative solution. This proposal involves implementing a snapshot delegation strategy, building a dashboard displaying all delegates on https://dao.vitadao.com/, onboarding delegates, and raising awareness for individuals to apply as delegates. This proposal requests 10,000 VITA tokens to be given to active delegates as a reward from tokenomics.
Meet Longevity/ SciComm WG Contributor: Maria Marinova
Maria Marinova is an active contributor to the VitaDAO Longevity-Dealflow and Science Comm Working Groups. She co-authors VitaDAO’s monthly Longevity Newsletter. Maria received her Ph.D. from UNSW Sydney, with a focus on extending reproductive lifespan and improving late-life women’s health using NAD booster. Outside of VitaDAO, she is a Venture Creation Analyst at Apollo Health Ventures and an AthenaDAO science lead.
How did you first get involved with the VitaDAO community?/ How did you first get involved in web3?
I found VitaDAO on Twitter. Being a part of both academic and crypto Twitter, it was inevitable to come across it and I was very excited to join. I’ve known longevity is what I want to do for a long time (I was the kid obsessed with aging even in school) so I’ve been pursuing that ever since. Web3 was a more recent passion that quickly grew thanks to my boyfriend, a self-proclaimed degen. I joined VitaDAO while I was still doing my Ph.D. and I’m glad I did because the drive of the community reminded me why I was doing it in the first place, when lab work got overwhelming. I was intrigued not only by the focus on aging research, but also by the many new web3 concepts introduced and the structures being built to make the foundation of a LongBio long-game project.
What does your role as a VitaDAO Longevity-DealFlow Working Group contributor and VitaDAO’s Science Comm contributor entail?
I joined the Longevity- deal flow working group, which sources relevant projects to fund and works with the research team to mature the idea and bring it to review by senior scientists. Once vetted promising, we try to negotiate the best deal for both sides and present a summary of our findings to the community to vote on.
I am also a part of the Awareness team. We aim to keep the community up to date with everything going on. I’ve contributed to Sci Comm articles, technical basic web3 infrastructure tutorials, project updates, and of course the Longevity Research Monthly Newsletter. We started writing this with Rhys Anderson because with the accelerating pace of science coming out of this field, we as academics could see the value in it. We all focus on a very narrow part of the field that we work on, and given the publication volume, it’s hard to keep track of other exciting publications across this space.
What has surprised you the most about VitaDAO?
The willingness of people to come together from all different fields to work on a common goal we’re all passionate about. That’s seen in the ease with which you work with people who have initiative and don’t require external motivation. Being given decision power in the DAO based on your contribution is also something that helps incentivize that even more and there’s something genius about this model.
What excites you most about VitaDAO’s future?
There’s a lot to look forward to. I am of course excited to see the results from the projects we supported and would love to see them reach the market someday. But frankly, I’m even more curious about how far the DeSci movement can go and what it can achieve. There are a lot of talented people working on the infrastructure that could challenge the current models that have been let to reign free for a long time and obviously have some issues, and people working in academia or pharma are well aware of that. I still don’t believe DeSci is something that can replace them but hopefully, it can at least challenge them to do better.
What advice would you have for a scientist interested in decentralized science/web3?
Just try it out — there’s no better way to understand it than from the inside. It has opened a whole new world for academics I know, and it is especially useful for early career researchers.
Join Us!
Have a special skill set? Contribute to VitaDAO and receive $VITA in return. Join the VitaDAO community on Discord and stay up to date on Twitter!
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