VitaDAO Whitepaper V0.1
Tyler Golato1, Paul Kohlhaas1
Draft open for public and community commentAbstractVitaDAO is a new cooperative vehicle for community-governed and decentralized drug development.
Our core mission is the acceleration of R&D in the longevity space and the extension of human lifeand
health-span. To achieve this, VitaDAO utilizes a combination of novel governance frameworks
and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and financial
engineering tools such as algorithmic automated market makers (AMMs) that run via the Ethereum
blockchain. Today, the biopharma industry is booming with unprecedented late-stage investment
inflows, particularly in the longevity space. However, critical early-stage funding is severely lacking
and incentives between patients, researchers and industry are misaligned.
At its core, biopharma value creation is composed of intellectual property rights and research data.
Research and development has become prohibitively expensive and siloed, partially due to how
intellectual property business models work in monopolizing innovation through patent portfolios.
These mechanisms prevent the open sharing of research data, inherently disincentivizing collaboration
and transparency. They prevent the public and patients from having any real ownership in therapeutic
IP, even though their tax dollars fund much of the early-stage development. Outside of grants to fund
basic research, early-stage funding for drug development is extremely limited, and when drugs do
finally make it to market, there are strong incentives for price gouging.
VitaDAO is an open cooperative that anyone can join and support. Its goal is to acquire, support, and
finance new therapeutics and research data in the longevity space. The collective will directly hold
legal IP rights to novel early-stage projects and may develop a growing portfolio of both IP and data
assets represented as NFTs. These data assets can be made available and monetized in novel data
marketplace structures such as Ocean Marketplace, promoting both open science and novel business
models.
Ownership and governance of the VitaDAO is relegated through VITA tokens. The token can be
obtained by contributing resources, work, or funds to VitaDAO. Ownership of tokens allows its holder
to engage in decision-making and governance of VitaDAO’s research, signal support for specific
initiatives, and govern its data repositories and IP portfolio.
Table of Contents
Abstract 0
Table of Contents 1
1 Introduction and Problem Statement 2
1.1 Intellectual Property in Biopharma 2
1.2 The Evolution of Pharma and the Valley of Death 2
1.3 Longevity Will Transform Our Approach To Medicine 3
2 Solution 4
3 Core Architecture 5
3.1 Organization and Governance 5
3.2 Genesis Bootstrapping & Liquidity 6
4 Holding and Managing IP and Data Assets 6
4.1 Intellectual Property Rights 6
4.2 Data Assets 7
5 Staking & Signalling 7
6 Genesis & First Project Lifecycle 8
7 Exit Scenarios and IP Commercialisation 8
8 Open Research Questions 9
9 Conclusion 9
References 10
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1 Introduction and Problem Statement
Current biopharma business models carry severe limitations and R&D inefficiencies at the cost of
those who should be the core stakeholders: patients in need of medication and researchers discovering
these molecules.
1.1 Intellectual Property in Biopharma
Fundamentally, value creation in biopharma is driven by two core assets: intellectual property (IP) and
research and development (R&D) data (Saha, 2011). When companies explore a use case for a new
therapeutic, they patent their discoveries to gain IP. This enables them to secure future revenue and
recoup the high costs of R&D. As companies invest billions of dollars into generating data to bring
therapeutics to market, they offset this by selling equity ownership or royalty rights (Olivier, 2020).
While IP is designed to incentivize innovation in theory, intellectual property ownership as a business
model has barely evolved in the past century and is largely analog, operating through extensive legal
contracts and bureaucratic complexities. Today, IP is one of the most valuable asset classes but
remains largely illiquid, hard to transfer, and rigid.
Moreover, the need for monopolistic IP ownership of both patents and data within biopharma
companies creates secrecy, centralization and disincentivizes much-needed collaboration and open
research in the scientific community, which could bring down the rising cost of drug development
(Bookbinder, 2020). Perfectly good drug candidates often fall to the wayside for organizational,
political, or competitive reasons. This concentration of research efforts leads to the high R&D cost
and long time-to-market that pharma is known for today. Pharma tends to only share positive R&D
data -- companies waste enormous resources ignorantly repeating each others’ failures. Under the
current system, incentives for open science, collaboration, and data sharing are severely lacking
(Ali-Khan, 2017).
On a macroscopic scale, this model leads to incentive misalignment and information asymmetry. IP
owners and sellers seeking to monopolize commercial value are not incentivized to report negative
research data. This creates a principal-agent dilemma and, in part, leads to a phenomenon coined the
“reproducibility crisis” (Sherkow, 2017). Thus, side effects or indicators of lower effectiveness of the
owned compounds are downplayed in favor of profit maximization, and valuable research findings are
“lost” for the broader scientific community and not considered during patient treatment. More
democratic, open, and transparent models are needed with a wider inclusion of stakeholders.
Lastly, the current financing and investment landscape centralizes and restricts access and
participation to early-stage biopharma from its most important stakeholders: patients and researchers.
In the US, only accredited investors may finance early-stage ventures. The market is opaque, and no
singular or efficient marketplace exists to discover or access these opportunities in a transparent
fashion.
1.2 The Evolution of Pharma and the Valley of Death
The process of drug development in the pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a significant shift in its
industrial organization. Increasingly, smaller biotech firms leverage recent academic research in the
life sciences to develop new drugs, which are then acquired by pharmaceutical giants using their
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access to low-cost capital to purchase expertise (Lo, 2021). The number of biotech startup companies
formed due to technology licensing has shifted dramatically in recent years - from 145 in 1994 to 278
in 2000 and 1,024 in 2016. Of the 30 top-selling drugs worldwide in 2000, only five were traceable to
universities; the remaining 25 were developed by big pharma. By 2018, more than one-half of the top
30 drugs were sourced from academia (Lo, 2021). Thus, biotech universities are increasingly proving
to be untapped goldmines of valuable IP, yet often these assets are not investable until a startup is
spun out.
Assets from universities that are not out-licensed or spun out into startups remain in a difficult limbo,
known as The Valley of Death, where they often fail to move forward (Seyhan, 2019). Many of these
technologies are extremely valuable to patients, and because of this system, they will ultimately never
serve the populations they were intended to. These assets require investment and capital injections at
an earlier stage, and new open commercialization models are desperately needed to incentivize their
development.
1.3 Longevity Will Transform Our Approach To Medicine
The longevity field has the power to transform our global healthcare system completely. Age-related
diseases are among the most significant contributors to our global health burden and are responsible
for the highest costs incurred by healthcare systems (WHO, 2020).
The longevity space is experiencing a tremendous boom, in part because of its ability to address this
problem. The space is evolving rapidly in terms of understanding the aging process and its capacity to
develop health- & life-extending therapeutics (Scheibye-Knudsen, 2020). It is now a routine
procedure to reverse the aging of human cells in the laboratory dish. Correspondingly, the economics
of investing in longevity are more attractive than ever. There are 100s of new companies and funds
dedicated to research and product development in the fields of senolytics, telomeres, stem cells,
mitochondria, and gene editing (Pfleger, 2021). These are some of the core domains from which
therapies that increase lifespan will emerge.
The rush of investment into the field has the potential to rapidly accelerate these developments but
also comes with distinct problems. The “centralization” of aging research by large institutions and
billionaires has the potential to create the same problems and pitfalls that plague the pharmaceutical
industry: intransparency, restricted access, and concentrated control over therapeutics that should be
made widely available to anyone at an affordable price.
We believe the future of health- and life-extension should be open, collaborative, and
community-owned. We see longevity as an entirely new approach to medicine, one that has the
potential to prevent, as opposed to treat or intervene. This approach will completely change the way
the world approaches medical care and will profoundly impact society.
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2 Solution
We propose the creation of VitaDAO: the first fully open and community-owned, transparent
intellectual property collective in longevity.
Members of the public can become co-owners of VitaDAO and its IP by purchasing VITA through
contributing funds, valuable research data, IP assets or performing services for VitaDAO. Ownership
and governance of VitaDAO is relegated through VITA tokens. VITA enables its holder to engage in
decision-making and governance of VitaDAO’s research, signal support for specific initiatives and
govern its data repositories and IP portfolio.
VitaDAO will acquire intellectual property rights, data and commission research to further develop
those assets. Further, it will monetize its intellectual property. In summary, VitaDAOs core assets can
consists of:
1. Intellectual property, patents and licenses to therapeutic research projects.
2. Data assets generated by funding R&D around its research projects.
3. Funds stored in its treasury, as well as unissued VITA tokens.
Intellectual property and data assets will be virtualized and represented as Non-Fungible Tokens
(NFTs), which are explained in more depth in Section 4.
In order to acquire and finance specific research proposals, VitaDAO members may elect to issue
tokens on a continuous or per-project basis, using automatic market makers (AMMs) like Balancer
Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools that enable a fair and transparent participation for prospective
members.
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3 Core Architecture
3.1 Organization and Governance
VitaDAO will be a non-incorporated partnership that consists of several core components of law and
novel smart contract architecture, including:
1. VitaDAO’s governance smart contract architecture, instituting a legally binding agreement
between all participants, modelled after Moloch DAO and the LAO.
2. VitaDAO’s contribution and liquidity bootstrapping mechanism utilising Balancer Liquidity
Bootstrapping Pools (LBPs) on a continuous basis (Balancer Labs, 2020).
3. VitaDAO’s NFT-based intellectual property holdings and data assets.
VitaDAO’s smart contract architecture enables members, which hold VITA to freely engage in
governance decisions pertaining to the assets and funds held by the collective. At its core, Vita will be
member-managed and rely on a Dapp and related smart contracts to facilitate the purchase, funding
and management of IP and data assets.
VitaDAO will rely on service providers (initially Molecule GmbH, legal advisors and other web3
development teams) to facilitate various administrative, legal and development functions pertaining to
the purchase and transfer of IP from universities, updating and maintaining the Dapp, validating and
formatting information selected by members and handling other interactions that may emerge over its
initial genesis and lifecycle.
The collective will not only govern over its existing structure, but its members will also propose and
vote on how to refine its governance processes. It is thus bestowed with the hard-coded ability to
rectify any shortcomings with a majority vote and to incorporate future progress in governance
developments in its system governance.
VitaDAO members are fully in control of all governance decisions by voting on VitaDAO proposals.
Proposals consist of several types, including governance proposals, project proposals, funding
proposals, data monetization proposals, and IP proposals. The types of proposals to be considered can
be expanded on an as-needed basis determined by members.
To provide the level of industry expertise required to be able to effectively and thoroughly evaluate
therapeutics projects, VitaDAO will elect a council of 3-6 industry experts to review its projects, data
and IP. This council assists in defining executive proposals to the VitaDAO members.
The initial goal of VitaDAO is to mimic successful execution patterns in the biotech industry, while
improving on those that do not work well. Over time, we expect further governance mechanisms to
emerge around VitaDAO.
In summary:
1. VitaDAO members are fully in control of all governance decisions by voting on VitaDAO
proposals.
2. VitaDAO will elect a council of 6 industry experts to review its projects, data and IP. This
council assists in defining executive proposals to the VitaDAO members. Furthermore,
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VitaDAO may elect to dedicate an individual executive for the community as a whole, or to
individual research projects.
3. VitaDAO may engage service providers spanning patent attorneys, contract research firms or
third party experts.
4. Our initial goal is to mimic successful execution patterns in the biotech industry. Over time,
we expect further governance mechanisms to emerge around VitaDAO.
3.2 Genesis Bootstrapping & Liquidity
For its initial Genesis, VitaDAO will deploy a Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (Balancer Labs,
2020) to enable interested participants to contribute funds to its treasury and join the collective. As
VitaDAO grows, members may elect to create additional LBPs to onboard further projects.
We anticipate that the initial genesis will operate as follows:
1. VitaDAO will allocate a small amount of its fixed token supply into a Balancer Liquidity
Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) with the goal to raise suf ficient funds to finance the first
project for two years, as well as provide funds for ongoing operations to refine system
dynamics and source additional projects. The community will decide on the full fundraising
budget and structure pending simulations and crypto economic modeling using cadCAD.
2. The LBP allows the community to contribute funds and join VitaDAO for the first time.
Simultaneously, the pool acts as an important first price discovery mechanism. Individuals
wishing to join may contribute a multitude of assets, such as ETH, USDC or Ocean and
receive VITA tokens according to the corresponding $ value. The primary currency of the
LBP will be USDC to ensure price stability.
3. After a fixed period, the LBP resolves, forwarding its acquired funds to VitaDAO and kick
starting its operation. Should the LBP fail to reach a specific threshold participants may
withdraw their stakes.
4 Holding and Managing IP and Data Assets
4.1 Intellectual Property Rights
The VitaDAO collective will directly hold legal IP rights to these projects and may develop a growing
portfolio of assets represented as NFTs. In order to achieve this, Molecule is developing a novel IP to
NFT framework, which allows the holder of an existing piece of IP in the form of a license or patent,
to attach said ownership to an NFT and transfer it to a new owner.
When the NFT is created, the creator must sign a cryptographic message which prints their signature
onto an IP licensing agreement. This transaction requires both buyer and seller of the NFT to sign a
message that includes references to the transaction, their respective identities and legal signature,
modelled after the legal Signature Algorithm pioneered by Open Law (OpenLaw, 2019).
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Initially, VitaDAO will primarily hold licenses to therapeutic research projects. These licenses enable
VitaDAO, or its designated service providers, to file for patents or various forms of market exclusivity
that would grow the value of its underlying assets.
4.2 Data Assets
Besides owning IP rights related to individual projects, VitaDAO will also own any data assets and
research outputs from the work it commissions and funds. VitaDAO will safely store these assets,
make them available to its members and the public at large and monetize them via Ocean Marketplace
(Ocean Protocol Foundation, 2020). Furthermore, VitaDAO could attach these data assets to NFTs,
where useful and applicable. This would drive fluid price discovery and liquidity for each individual
data set, as buyers and sellers engage around individual data sets and curate the most valuable
findings. The overall value of VITA tokens could then be derived through the sum of its individual
priced data assets, IP assets and liquidity pools. The applications around composability and
interoperability here are manifold and will be fully explored once first versions are in production.
Finally, obfuscation of data assets and enabling secure computation on them will be a highly relevant
future use case that could be facilitated by Web3 data protocols such as Ocean Protocol.
Data assets could include, but are not limited to: laboratory updates and reports, processed data,
quarterly updates, western blot data, qPCR data, cell culture experiments, survival analysis, sequence
data, western blot gels, microscopy and cell culture. These data assets could be in the forms of raw
data CSV files, images or PDFs.
The type of data assets and their monetization potential are summarized below:
1. Public Data Assets: all data in these assets are viewable by members, which can vote to list
these data packages on Ocean Marketplace.
2. IP Data Assets: Required for filing of patents or further IP. These assets will be obfuscated as
they could compromise filing of IP. These assets could be uploaded to Ocean Marketplace, as
soon as IP has been filed to protect them.
3. Progress Data Assets: intended to keep DAO members up-to-date on ongoing research
findings and serving as proof of progress. This data has a certain level of obfuscation,
meaning that any information that could compromise the intellectual property itself will be
hidden. Such data would not be relevant for Ocean Marketplace.
Members wishing to engage with the IP, review the data assets directly, or engage with the council,
will need to submit KYC documentation and sign non-compete and confidentiality agreements. This
helps ensure the viability of the IP for all members.
5 Staking & Signalling
VITA tokens may be used to signal long-term support for individual projects. A member may stake
their VITA tokens for a set time period until a project milestone is reached (e.g. 3M/6M/12M). Project
milestones are predetermined by projects and measurable. However, their outcome is uncertain,
meaning members take additional risk by foregoing liquidity.
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When a milestone is reached, staked tokens are unlocked. In return for locking tokens, VitaDAO pays
out regular signalling rewards to stakers. This process sends valuable signals to the market, as it
showcases the confidence of members in specific projects. Furthermore, it reduces volatility and
creates a circular economy to members, which actively contribute value and review project success.
It is anticipated that signalling will be implemented after the first successful project has run an initial
funding cycle, giving members time to sufficiently model this mechanism and implement it in
VitaDAO V2.
6 Genesis & First Project Lifecycle
The following section details the initial Genesis project acquisition and models out a first potential
project lifecycle. After successful completion of its Genesis Liquidity Bootstrapping and instantiation
of its governance mechanism, VitaDAO members will vote to incorporate the first longevity
therapeutic into its collective. Molecule will propose to attach one of its longevity projects with the
Scheibye-Knudsen Laboratory at the University of Copenhagen to an NFT and sell this to VitaDAO.
Once the sale is complete, members can vote to allocate a first tranche of funding to the University of
Copenhagen to commence research.
The first project lifecycle could operate as follows:
1. Molecule proposes to VitaDAO to purchase the Scheibye-Knudsen Laboratory IP as an NFT.
2. VitaDAO members vote on the proposal and define the project parameters and payment
schedules with the Scheibye-Knudsen Laboratory.
3. The project commences, as VitaDAO completes a first payment to initiate the preclinical
studies.
4. The Scheibye-Knudsen Laboratory begins delivering first data assets consisting of progress
reports, raw data and initial findings.
5. First definitive findings are in, and VitaDAO members, with the support of industry advisors,
decide on how to use the data and further commercialise the asset. This could result in:
a. File for further IP and patents.
b. File for clinical trials and further studies.
c. Monetize the data sets through Ocean Marketplace.
6. Simultaneously, VitaDAO may decide to launch further Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools for
additional projects at any point, which are sourced through its community, or to raise
additional funding for the Scheibye-Knudsen Laboratory.
7 Exit Scenarios and IP Commercialisation
Finally, if the research data surrounding an asset is sufficiently positive and clinical trials attractive,
VitaDAO can license or sell its IP or data to institutional stakeholders, such as pharmaceutical or
biotech companies. Given enough liquidity and governance sophistication, VitaDAO could even
attempt to bring these assets to market itself. Members of VitaDAO decide how to distribute income
generated from successful IP monetization.
Individual IP and NFTs may be spun out into separate refractionalized markets to enable more
granular participation by the public. From a technical perspective, this would entail moving the NFT
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and associated data sets out of custodianship of VitaDAO into a sub-DAO represented by a new
ERC20 token. Members of VitaDAO may elect to spin out a project to:
1. Enable the project and IP to raise additional funding from a wider community.
2. Create exit scenarios for VitaDAO and further decentralize project ownership.
3. Enable more granular fundability and participation on a project level.
8 Open Research Questions
The mechanics described in this paper are novel, experimental and rely on multiple moving parts,
especially the creation of an active tokenized governance community. Our goal is to tackle these
questions together as a community and through multiple working groups that contain industry experts,
as they will substantially improve the system’s long-term potential.
1. Governance and effective collective decision-making around drug development projects:
can a decentralized community effectively govern and attract the expertise required to
successfully commercialize therapeutics? Will the token-based voting mechanism described
herein succeed in generating positive outcomes?
2. Biopharma business logic: will the biopharma industry be open to purchasing IP and patents
produced by a decentralized collective, as opposed to current business practices? Will
VitaDAO be able to support a sufficient number of projects to become positive sum at scale?
3. Legal and patent law: can VitaDAO successfully file for further patents on the IP assets it
manages or will it have to rely on third parties? In case of patent litigation against VitaDAO,
is it able to protect the validity of the IP as a normal company could?
9 Conclusion
The open IP and data ownership structures presented here could help to alleviate some of the most
severe challenges in the current pharmaceutical and biotech pipeline and help create a future of open
and democratic ownership of longevity therapeutics.
First, IP collectives like VitaDAO could help realign incentives with neglected stakeholder groups -
patients and scientists - by creating alternative democratic research structures that distribute value and
governance more evenly. Imagine research on a new breakthrough insulin treatment funded by
diabetics who believed in it and stand to benefit the most from it. What would this do to access and
pricing?
Second, separating R&D data creation from IP ownership helps overcome a costly principal-agent
dilemma and the current reproducibility crisis. In an openly traded curation market and structure, both
negative and positive data might surface much sooner and the best therapeutics succeed. Third,
transparent financialization of data and open composability with decentralised financial markets
opens up entirely new and accelerated funding models to promising scientists and laboratories across
the globe.
From an industry perspective, we believe that IP cooperatives like VitaDAO could be a win-win
situation for all stakeholders: biopharma, researchers, and patients. It combines traditional industry IP
holding structures with novel tokenized ownership accessible by anyone wishing to contribute to the
research. In doing so, it drives valuable innovation in the biopharma industry.
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