Paul Kohlhaas & Tyler Golato: VitaDAO – The Collective Funding Longevity Research #403

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 403 with guests paul kolhas and tyler golato [Music] welcome to epicenter the podcast where we interview crypto founders builders and thought leaders i'm frederick ans and i'm here with hi i'm maher and today we're speaking with pauline tyler from vitadao vita dao 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 vitadao actually concerns itself

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 dex 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 chaining 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 c5 experience on d5 so stay tuned i would also like to thank chorus1 chorus provides staking solutions on 25 major

networks like solana and cosmos 10 000 parties delegate to them assets that are worth over one billion dollars in total chorus now also offers a white label solution for running branded nodes on course one's seller infrastructure follow them on twitter at course1 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 frederico thank you awesome to be here cool let's dive right in both of you can can you give us a little bit of background on you where where you uh where you come from academically and basically what made you interested in longevity research in the

first place yeah great to be on on the show um really enjoy epicenter um hi everyone so my name is paul kolhas um i got really interested in in biohacking and and pharma actually doing during high school already i spent a lot of time on on in online forums like early early reddit um forms like blue light actually uh and other forms where people were discussing uh various analogs to to known compounds in kind of in very open source fashion and what you could really call as like the open the early days of um of open source pharma communities uh where you had people that were looking either looking at analogs of scheduled substances or actually looking at analogues to to medication that they simply

couldn't 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 um that persist to this day and unfortunately actually lots of these communities have been kind of having 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 form by google um and so i then went on and studied economics um in switzerland and while i was studying i got into trading biotech stocks and so we had like a small group of trading friends we're just like analyzing different stock trends and one person there was doing an internship

um at bitcoin swiss one of the first bitcoin um hops and exchanges in switzerland and uh through that got really interested in bitcoin and the broader bitcoin community it's also just around the time of the mount cox hack really really interesting days back then i then did an internship um in burma actually in myanmar for three months and realized how stringent capital controls were like back then um in that country and how bitcoin was really being actually used on the ground for by people to like smuggle u.s dollars into the country and then in 2015 government into the ethereum community uh began kind of yeah began working in in the open source ethereum space and organizing meetups in in south

africa um did a project in digital identity with with unicef and through that got in touch with consensus um and then started doing a lot of work on digital identity and data marketplaces um at viewport actually which is now a part of the u-port team became three bucks it's really crazy thinking thinking back how how much of the industry could change so quickly uh and then through doing a lot of work on data marketplaces um had this aha moment where i thought hey a lot of the the incentives and misalignment in in the pharmaceutical system could be um it could be changed by adopting these incentives that we that people were developing in data marketplaces so essentially how we how companies can share data openly

and really work collaboratively on on these data sets um 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 macro economics of pharma so why it takes so long for certain drugs to get to market and so in 2018 met meant tyler and we began kind of conceptualizing how a marketplace for drug development pharmaceutical development uh could look like um and tyler's background is deep in at the time was deep actually in biogerontology and aging research um and actually tyler of with that hand it over to you cool yeah so i i started out my um 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 my parents graduated from from high school so they were a bit confused i think about like 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 in medicine but also also in research and sort of saw relatively early on that medicine was

was quite applied i had a strong interest in in cancer somewhat early on just because of touch points with my with my family as well while i was studying i began really looking into oncology and then sort of after graduating uh joined uh an experimental therapeutic experimental therapeutics fellowship at columbia university where i was working to develop therapeutics initially for for pancreatic cancer glioblastoma or endocrine tumors and various types 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 if 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 healthcare 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 then sort of yeah 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 the patient and how it's how it's going to play out during that time simultaneously i also really became interested in in sort of more preventative approaches to medicine and 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 as as marino's is is um really brutal for lack of a better term you sort of engage in this war with the body um using a series of highly toxic drugs um and the outcomes are are sometimes okay in some cancers and in other times um you know it's not really an efficient treatment modality so i became interested in in biogerontology because what i was seeing at the time was this idea that many age-related diseases were bound together tied together by

this 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 a focus specifically on on oxidative stress and oxidative damage the basic excision repair pathway and also segmental progerias which are basically a series of accelerated aging disorders that we study as a as a general model to understand the aging process and this these are 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 these very young children that look like they're incredibly old while i 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 um 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 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 um just trying to understand what a different healthcare context is like and instead of focusing on diseases of affluence like like aging for example i wanted to see the sort of other side of the coin worked on hiv vaccine development for 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 after a mutual friend was introduced to to paul this was a 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 um 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 uh but was always sort of like a skeptic in terms of i think um not really seeing a huge number of applications that i thought were 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 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 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 and joined full-time with with molecule and we've been yeah sort of thinking about this problem ever since and and vitadao is is one of really the first i would say real world examples of a lot of the learnings that we've picked up over the past three years and in practice i'm actually uh

curious about how you know like this longevity space is different from traditional health care at one level you can argue that traditional health care is all about longevity right so i go to the doctor and the doctor sees my cholesterol is kind of high and they prescribe me statins and maybe delay my heart attack by five years that's longevity or in my case i have i have cancer and i get a bunch of chemotherapy in the traditional health care space i may get 10 20 years of extra life that's that's longevity so in many ways like the healthcare system is 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 healthcare system yeah so i mean you're absolutely right and in terms of you know the healthcare system should generally be focused on 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 healthcare 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 healthcare potentially and it's still very nascent right this is a field that's still developing but the 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 are 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 that is you know highly advanced and highly evolved but i would pose the question that other than communicable diseases so things that could 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 interestingly there's also this sort of problem i think in terms of how drug development is incentivized that relates to you know sort of the the macroeconomics of pharma are really tuned to like the 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 to jump in and say something there yeah there's a there's a really famous um uh a report from goldman sachs i think 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 um and essentially this new hep c drug was a pill-based treatment that essentially cured hepatitis c almost cured in most cases within um within six months and novartis had previously had a whole range of other treatments on the market perhaps he 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 a hundred thousand dollars per treatment when it came out to the market meaning that a large part of the patient population couldn't even couldn't afford it

but coming back to the city 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 um 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 to promote at creating a customer base and sustaining that customer base which doesn't necess doesn't necessarily lead to longer or happier lives so the other sort of problem i think is that again i we talked about this a little bit before but like aging is not

considered to to be a disease and what you tend to get in the in health care is this extremely granular approach to disease so we spend we've had a 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 alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease most people die of either cardiovascular disease or 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 of the integrity of dna or or mutation you could for example target dna repair and try to bolster that endogenously to the point where individuals didn't really start to accumulate mutations so i think it's 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 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 um taking a more preventative approach to health care as opposed to the one that we take currently just to add one last point there on ramadan actually i find when i first got into the longevity and aging community uh actually through through thailand i think late 18 early 2019 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 just to add something so it was an immediate culture of it um so so i mean um viewing aging as a disease this is this is a total

paradigm shift in 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 um expect of the longevity research do i expect to you know see a hundred a hundred fifteen a hundred and fifty uh what what's and how how do you guys go about this so basically do i take supplements is it um lifestyle or is it uh is it both yeah so i mean i'm 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 or sort of figure heads 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 um achievement if we could manage to live to be a hundred in good health without this precipitous decline that typically occurs i think i'm 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 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 or sort of in the context of certain geoprotectives which we've seen work fairly well in 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 to let's say delay the aging process these are things like caloric restriction which um i think in in some model organisms and in in non-human primates has been shown to be somewhat effective uh 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 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 uh 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 might for

example increase mitochondrial thermogenesis and then allow you to lose weight or you know there's there's all these different sort of pharmacological interventions but i would say that the the best advice that i could give would be to you know find something that works for you personally if if uh intermittent fasting is something that you're comfortable doing then um i think that's a true 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 yep this is a little bit of a long story but i'll try 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 with the with the specifics but i think it's a really interesting example there was a group of sardinians that migrated to i believe it's called roswell pennsylvania so they moved from italy to this place in 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 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 with 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 watch 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 lived person uh ever was jean-claude mont who lived

to be 122 and a half and you know her secret was port wine and cigarettes so for me to come and tell you exactly what the what the right answer is is is quite difficult and it's probably personal but uh 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 a you know and promote health this is making me question my life choices as a crypto person and three-time mom so so maybe let's talk about how longevity research

currently takes place in the pharma industry so basically what is currently being researched and um why do you guys think this the 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 it is 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 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 the 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 um resembles aging or you know gives 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 and in pharma maybe to add something here so because aging isn't good so pharma could be interested in longevity or like let's say longevity drugs because it's a 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

um 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 um 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 big of a space but i actually so if um if aging was considered a disease then you could actually take these drugs into clinical trials into the clinic as talo was saying and they could form a part of the typical large pharma discovery pipeline but they

currently don't um and it'll be interesting to see whether the changes i think there's several proposals to the fda to actually make um make aging a disease in the broader sense um tyler do you know where those curry 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 barzillai is someone who has actively challenged this with the tame trial looking at metformin he's out of einstein brian kennedy has been very vocal uh about this as well some of the i mean everyone who's i think quite a serious player in the space is is advocating for this and i know there's a lot of

work being done trying to um lobby on a political level to get this changed and you know 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 you're seeing generally the growth in the sort of longevity field in general is you know 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 target aging as a disease but you can imagine that there's also

you know a lot of factors that 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 over human lifespan um 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 um sort of study of um on aging i i think that exists in the world and that's been running for maybe maybe 70 or so years now perhaps a little bit less but i mean yeah that's like almost one full generation and so it's it's 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 that are actually measuring to understand whether or not something is affecting aging from my perspective one of the like one of the most promising things like or like not promising things but easiest things to to look at are actually like known natural compounds that we know of that extent aging not by not by 30 or so years but maybe by five or ten years so there's been recent studies about um about spermidine which are looking which are looking very well there's reservatrol um there's things like rapamycin that that have been tested in humans for quite a while or even in some cases for thousands of years there's certain certain um chinese herbs that 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 the things that can extend human lifespans statistically maybe by five or so years maybe by 10 and as like with these longitudinal studies you have to actually imagine how difficult it is to like develop something that can affect aging effectively because you'll have to test it 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 that might work very well but um yeah these examples kind of illustrate the

difficulty with the with the with the field right so i mean i'm aware of the example of metformin which is uh 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 i think this is lower instance of cancer or something like that so it's it's it's like one of these drugs for which you have like very strong data because uh you're prescribing it to 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 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 a drug for all of us and uh and yeah that's that's that's kind of where where most of these things are stuck at right like so a different example that uh tyler mentioned rapamycin it's known for 40 years and you you couldn't basically go and take rapamycin if you if you wanted to accept the trade offs of

rapamycin which are actually lipomycin is not an easy drug probably to take for for 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 things but but what stops you from just go 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 issue is that like you can take metformin

that way but then you're not really generating data when you when i'm buying metformin of some of some chinese vendor and eating it eating 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 um 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 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 metformin as an off-label beta 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 uh like mayor said this sort of lack of commercial incentives metformin has been off-page for for a long time this is also why the tame trial has had

some difficulties it's 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 are we doing it to to create um some sort of way to patent a compound and i think these are 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 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 or the endpoint they're driven by this sort of case for intellectual property so is the question really how to how to fund a public good in the space of farmer so basically i mean as as i understand it from you guys now i can patent a chemical compound for a number of years but i can't

um i can't patent the metadata of how to take it or when to take it and so on um so is the mechanism design faulty here so basically my question is i mean maybe that's let's kind of take this into the vitadao space so basically how is vitado going to alleviate these problems and how is the research um going to be conducted through vita dao or funded by vitadow orchestrated by vitado so maybe to to start off at like a very high level i think that you have like i think paul and i if you asked us 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 um 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 what is what is the 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 there's a ton of academic literature more broadly about patents and 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 by large organizations that want to protect their innovation and a patent is is designed to incentivize a company or an organization to invest a lot of upfront r d capital in order to to make it worth their while

to invest it and then to be able to commercialize later on to recoup those costs and so the government essentially uses its its power to enforce the patent through violence in essence um as as is the power of the government but so what this does now is is patents um often reside within organizations that don't share data about them so when when one let's say let's take the biopharma space one um 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 to kind of sell the

drug on and so if we think about how science should work science should really be open and collaborative um and 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 uh which leads to enormous costly 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 to share positive data not the negative ones so a lot of is being redone so how can you change this essentially by by fractionalizing ownership in in patents and and distributing it between

a much larger um group of stakeholders and so if you take this to the nth degree imagine if if a patent that represented a drug was publicly traded so anyone could buy shares in this in this patent it's still um it's still protected through the patent but that 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 samuel de la ruviere's super early some of this design thinking came from simon de la ruiva's very early work on curation markets which i know mayor you you also um worked on i think in 2017 uh ish very early days um just basically thinking there's thinking around

information markets um 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 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 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 is um

ghost completely counter that and um so what tyler was explaining is where we essentially began working on were ways where a large group of people could coordinate uh or a large group of stakeholders could coordinate more publicly around ip ownership um and from those are really the early days of thinking around veda dasa if let's say if you take long 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 um 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 the intellectual property around them i'm kind of struggling to understand how that was 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 is that kind of an oxymoron in itself does does this kind of go together definitely i mean it's super challenging right so i mean this is and the way that we've sort of approached this so i i think this is an intractable problem with humanity which is the 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 based 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 follow 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 altruism you have the stakeholders that have the most um let's say inherently altruistic persona being the the benefactors of the system and the to make more sense of that how how would a diabetic actually price insulin right so if if the 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 they're 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 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 by revenue mechanics but if if for example if if you had a drug and that drug was now the 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 and wanting to be incentivized to price something a certain way and so this is this is the design thinking that 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 vitadao 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 it's two different visions right so paul came in and he weighed in on like okay once you make the ownership of intellectual 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 uh that drug is expected to be i tended to see that as a very you know

like cutthroat rational market where you know like the owners are extremely selfish and the people trading on the price of this information of this on this intellectual property are like all all selfish and like we are kind of using the selfishness of all of them to extract information about the drug in a in a public forum whereas with tyler with your uh with what you said it almost feels like so with like 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 all the drug but 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 taos 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 i no definitely i mean so i i think paul and i also approached this from two slightly different angles and what we tend to get is is something in the middle but i think that they're both they're like the way i don't know for sure what the outcome of either of those experiments would be and they're they're closely related

one is just you know in in the version that i was describing you're 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 of regulation in a way is 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 we come at this problem from two two different sides and tend to arrive somewhere in the middle between both um but no you're you're certainly right i think a lot of our a lot of the formation of molecule and also vitadao and the thing has been you know out of

debates as as founders in terms of like what the right sort of design thinking would look like and and i think what i we've both arrived at is that what we want to create is is a lot of experimentation where the you know we can sort of iterate and create proof of concepts things like vita dial 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 then sort of define how how the vision advances and how the space advances but i i think it's yeah we think about this in slightly different ways that i i personally think complement each other and i 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 and um 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 um what we're building is a form of a protocol of how to how to manage and and like and bring these assets to patients and that can take very different forms so even vitadao 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 in another form what tyler described is i could for example

um form a patient collective as a dao and and what we do is we convince researchers to to bring to to kind of to let us fund their assets because we promise those researchers that um that their research will never be commercialized in x or y way that it will never be priced in x y way and that might convince the researchers so it's really only setting the gate 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 um into the direct development space

yeah and this is this is definitely speaking with like our our molecule hats on as as opposed to the the sort of vita dial hats which i think is is playing in a somewhat specific design space in this in a specific way but i think you know we 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 would those drive you've talked about molecule and vitadao let's maybe clear that up so basically vitadao is the dao that raised funds and that kind of allocates resources and what's molecules role if we think about vitada we have to we

have to kind of understand or think through um how vitadao can actually interact with the real world and hold real world ip and so what we've been working on this molecule for quite a while is like how do we bridge the gap between the real real world research and patents and intellectual property which is where value resides in the current biotech and pharmaceutical system so a biotech company an early stage biotech startup normally has a few assets um that they've patented or maybe they even they it's it's pre-ip and that forms the core value of a biotech company if if one biotic company like if a pharma company acquires a biotech company they're normally acquiring it for a portfolio of ip that they hold and um and drugs if we think of drugs or therapeutics as they travel through this

long uh pharmaceutical development process it's typically two core assets it's it's ip uh and and data um 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 into the transient ethereal world of web3 and you can do that as data uh so for example vitada can hold uh 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 video holds these acid it might be very difficult for anyone to kind of to acquire that from vitada

and so what we worked on for a long time with molecule is is um attaching ip intellectual property rights to non-fungible tokens um so i started scheming on that idea that there's early articles where i compare cryptokitties to molecules and like i think like actually i i first presented that at dapcon i think um returner fredericki also co-hosted at the time and okay so first thought is attaching ip to nfts to make them travel into the world of web 3 and make them transactable in web3 and so the role of molecule bd is to help veda dao acquire acquire ip as in and hold it on chain as we did in the same way for example that you can imagine um flamingo dao 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 vitadao is is acquiring and funding our research uh specifically early stage research of longevity researchers and biotech company across the world and holding them on chain as as ipnfts uh and that's kind of a framework that that molecules help pioneer and so our core role at molecule is to really help get these assets into into unchained structures that can now help finance them in a very simple way you could look at molecule as an open c

for biotech ip uh and that then helps form patient collectives that can actually own and and fund the research around them then the next thought is well okay you essentially you need you need something that is aching to a biotech company to make these assets productive and so vitadon 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 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 vdot 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 als always issues with ip you don't want to leak the iep but you want to be able to analyze it as a collector and it's not that different than um then actually then some companies would function if they were doing research if you have a company you also you normally outsource a lot of the 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 um and so in vitadao's case it it then holds these ipnfts that uh often represent sub licenses of

um of real world research we work with um with with ip law firms and patent attorneys to make sure that it's it's packaged in a way that is fully industry compliant and so vitadon then in the next step could um decide to sell that asset on to another buyer it could also so let's say let's say and with asset i really mean a research project um so for example with the university of copenhagen and the cyber nuts and aging aging research laboratory we have a first project that is being attached to an nft um tyler can i can probably should can share a little bit more about the project um just now and so um then a first set of studies kick off and and if any of the compounds in that

study are hit um v dot 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 for any of these things and kind of allow more people from the public to to become contributors in that market or it could decide to simply sell it to another buyer which is really how kind of how a lot of early stage drug development works it's like assets typically pass from company to company until they make it um to market so we currently don't actually anticipate that a structure like we did 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 vidal logo on a packet of longevity drugs um but what i think is very likely that through this collective that vitadao is building that it will make very sound funding decisions and those funding decisions could result in very valuable ip findings and then vita now 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 beta down makes a discovery that could extend human life by like 500 years and then decides actually this should never reach humanity or patience

and and let's destroy the iep like so as a tao and as a governance vehicle all those options are fully open um to the community of vita holders maybe just one other so i mean i think as slightly more um or just a simpler way to think about it is that molecule is basically creating the technical and legal frameworks that allow daos to hold intellectual property on chain and is basically also creating a rule book on how these dowels 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 dials in many different therapeutic areas and sort of serve in some ways an impetus for this biotech dal revolution that we hope really comes into existence over the next years with

different design iterations and different flavors and different incentive mechanics yeah vitadao in some ways from from from my perspective is one of the first really proof of concepts for the the technology that that molecule has been building to sort of allow dals to actually hold and interact with with intellectual property and have and have these sort of novel governance mechanisms that 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 nuts and lab and like go over what is exactly funded and the kinds of chemicals that could result and how it was translated into ip and like the entire value chain to

clarify uh how molecule and meted all work together absolutely so um molecule has been interacting with the shabbai nuts and laboratory for the better part of two years so morton shabai knutson was a scientist that i really admired during my time at the national institute on aging so he was a he was a postdoc he's an mb 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 postdocs 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 like something called mitod 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 a up-and-coming person in the space who's whose work i really admired and when we started building molecule i was in touch with morton uh fairly frequently about some of the ideas that we were having he was always very supportive and i think um 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 he

received exclusive access to the danish healthcare system's prescription and health database records that go back uh 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 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 seem to have quite a significant impact on lifespan so something in the the five to eight year additional years of life which is quite significant from uh 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 that we're looking at at about 10 could be repurposed for for longevity and what's particularly interesting is that these are not therapeutics that have been classically described in 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 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 are really surprising so it's sort of an example of a sort of 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 patents some are off-patent and also from a mechanistic perspective the way that some of these drugs are working in terms of the the what they're typically prescribed for is probably not the thing that is actually providing longevity benefits so we were we were speaking to morton about this for you know quite a long time he had presented this project at various conferences and 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 um this sort of the timing was right in the sort of you

know the nft space had really evolved our our thinking around the legal and technical framework for vita dell was was sort of maturing we decided that we were going to try to bring a community together to to build this doll and um yeah morton was one of the first people that that we reached out to where we were like this is a prime first project for adele everything sort of lines up and morton is also a scientist who is like he's just very forward-thinking he's you know for him it was really exciting that there would be a community behind this he wants to give updates from the once the funding actually begins he wants to be giving updates you know 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 were looking for in terms of a first sort of let's say use case for what vitadao could fund was also someone that is sort of fully aligned with the vision mission ethos of the dao 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 and to be honest like yeah this is something that we preempted quite a bit so i mean we were in conversations with the tto before vida dao even even existed um we knew that this process especially

with you know the first one is always going to be the the most difficult as soon as there's a precedent and other universities see that this is something that can be done yeah i think it it's the 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 it at multiple conferences in denmark and and sort of chatting to various people and trying to yeah have different lawyers explaining what this is you know it's one thing if you're crypto native to explain what a tao 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

i you can't go in with the expectation that everyone has a really deep understanding of all these things um yeah paul did you want to say something i mean interestingly really since over the past six months also since we started vetoed there's been an enormous push in academia on nfts um so we were just recently about i think about a week ago we presented to an organization called autm which is really the largest tech transfer uh 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 um i think there was a case where um uc berkeley

recently kind of sold an 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 uh or even i think the submissions to the to the patent office yeah peyton payton disclosure forms yeah they're paid disclosure forms um but interestingly there's been a huge push um 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 vitadon has really managed to attract ice 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 some also in asia that have just introduced themselves on a daily basis and the intervened our introductions can be the introduction channel and so just yeah recently in conversations i think it's gotten a lot easier to kind of convince people uh and and institutions and organizations of these new models and yeah it's really at a point where where i mean vitada has had several conversations with biotech companies that are willing to like or interested

in attaching royalty rights and some of their elite compounds to nfts and this comes back again actually to the mia 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 maybe in stage two stage one stage two trials you'll have so big pharma companies coming in and saying cool we'll purchase forty uh of the future sales or future royalty rights in your asset um and and we'll finance them according

to the following milestones uh and now you can essentially kind of give that um kind of give these options to the public which is actually also really interesting interesting to start up so i found in terms of adoption both startups and and institutions are really actively or like quite getting quite open to these ideas because there's been so much grace in other fields even like this example of the medicine 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 right so the way i understood the the example that tyler gave is so um this this lab it has identified 10

chemicals right now let's call them a 1 a 2 a 3 a 4 up to a 10 right like these 10 chemicals are historically known to have a extent lifespan or have an impact on lifespan based on the danish dataset and what the professor and the lab is saying essentially is you have a1 a2 up to a10 but if you if you think of a1 maybe there are analogs b1 c1 and a d1 of a1 in which uh 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 they are compound similar to a1 and because they they're similar to a1 and not a1 they can still be patented and we can preserve the lifespan expanding property of of a1 in this trunks hopefully so basically our project could create like these three analogues but not not just three analogs of a1 but like analogs of b1 and logs of c1 and logs of d1 so we could come up end up coming out with a portfolio of let's say 15 or 20 different drugs and patents where we have drugs that could have a good effect on lifespan and as i passed and 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 dial creates what's called a you can 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 medcam or create another another analog and basically what vitadell owns is a sub license for any of the ip that results from this set of predefined experiments so the in 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 feta does 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 the laboratory around any of you know there's it 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 de dao will have a 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 out license 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 vitadow to go to researchers at universities all over the world figure out who's working on what and and and you know what might be interesting for me to dot a fund and then basically engage in these agreements where the lab can basically

get funding from the dell i'll begin doing work uh 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 a patent 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 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 and this nft sort of key that unlocks this layer can be 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 of the regular payton 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 that sort of technical implementation yeah i mean the interesting thing that this might trigger so this the federated data storage part that the time mentioned so at first and maybe to just reiterate what you what you said me so essentially the nft represents a real world legal contract um that is but that is countersigned by vitadao as the as the real world ip holder through a sub licensing agreement so that is a first step attached to this nft um and then comes into full ownership of vitadao there's a sale agreement between the the buyer and the seller of like cool we're now buying this and we're gonna

finance research around it and then the financing part starts and that starts producing data and so the nft in the same vein can also be used to unlock a federated let's say data storage this is almost like using the nft to unlock your google drive just that it's not a google drive it's it's it's federated data storage that stays on side of the university which helps get a 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 the asset keeps growing 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 ift that nft could easily be sold on and in the real world today um 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 rules of that game still need to be determined but personally i find it extremely interesting that with a growing data set like almost like making the nft data rich or making the project data rich obviously increases its its potential value um and that cannot be passed on from participant to participant um and it could yeah it could really alleviate some of the pressures

especially that researchers and universities have around around getting their research funded and essentially being able to transact in it um yeah this is a super fascinating discussion i 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 or 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 dial so you have the sort of members and the token holders would 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 dial these are things like governance tokenomics operations and the most critical one for the mission of the dao is 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 were 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 dal and the community around what agent is how it works what it 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 um up the things that it serves to let's say improve from the perspective of the dao

is how assets are found evaluated and due diligenced so this longevity working group is actually the the group that's going out speaking to universities identifying projects um and working on a sort of day-to-day basis to ensure that there's quality deal flow coming into vitadao and that the projects that are coming in are quite interesting and then if if there's a funding proposal for um 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 unchained at the end of the day it's up to the community 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 you know it it takes a lot of domain expertise in the context of biotech to really have you know 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 pharma companies or something maybe maybe i i t i have my crypto hat on too much but it feels like this is

definitely vulnerability right absolutely i mean so it's built on a system of trust uh to a certain extent so that vulnerability will always exist to to some extent but it's basically the working group itself and the working group steward so the person who sort of takes takes the lead in individual working group are responsible for vetting applicants the applicants are reviewed across a you know a number of criteria they have this is not super typical crypto where everyone is anonymous and no one's identities are are um 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 as like a pfizer executive undercover without people knowing so there are some sort of let's say very basal um identity protections and things like that and then people can also be removed from the working group so i mean if 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 to remove someone from from 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 um make it more robust yes definitely um so that's we're actively looking at a reputation system vitado is still relatively fresh and it's like on chain as an on-chain life form um we've actually just had the first the first couple of proposals that that that passed i think actually the cybernutsen proposal that we just spoke about is is about to go live and kind of be voted on by the community um i think there's several other proposals for like different other projects that are already going on um the other form of that i think will actively explore over time just in terms of making governance more efficient as delegation so being able to delegate to certain people in in the group

so for example if um if there's a researcher so we have lots of well-known researchers out of the longevity space that have joined vitadao or even let's say we've had several vcs that have drawn 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 um so i think does it operate by by consensus as opposed to dissents a dissent um are quite effective and you should really only put like put large governance decisions up to vote that are that are maybe contentious so

you don't want to 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 um so far that's proven very yeah very efficient uh and then all kind of all decisions that are made within vitada that concern kind of the vita token kind of the treasury that we did our managers the funds that it's raised all of those decisions anything that moves stuff around on chain should really be put up to um to vote to vita token holders cool thank you so much paul and tyler so basically um 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 where the the state of the research and how to access vita dao i assume the best way to get in touch with you guys is 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 gonna go and how long i will 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 such a big topic my hand i we we've kind of picked on a couple of um

of um areas where we felt it was still a little bit inconsistent in the vision but i mean obviously the the the goal is so large and worthy uh i'm super excited for this for 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 pleasure being on the on the show and uh yeah i 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. um so wishing both of you a lot of longevity and and to the show of course yeah thank you so much it was an absolute pleasure to speak with both of you and great questions thank you for joining us on this week's

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