VitaDAO Letter: Falling DAOn the Longevity Rabbit Hole🍁

Hello Vitalians! While the seasons might be changing, VitaDAO’s unwavering commitment to extending healthy lifespan remains constant! This month, VitaDAO members traveled across the globe to attend conferences, spoke with field leaders through TwitterSpace events, screened new project submissions, and funded even more research! Inside this edition of our Newsletter, you can find:

• A Twitter Space Month In Review  
• The Latest VitaFAST Updates
• How to become a VitaDAO Delegate 
• Competition Winning VitaDAO Memes

🗣️A Month of VitaDAO’s Twitter Space In Review 

August was a vibrant month filled with enlightening Twitter Spaces, or as we now call them, X Spaces. The conversations began with Sergei Young, a prominent longevity investor who founded the $100M Longevity Vision Fund. Max Unfried and Laurence Ion engaged in a thought provoking dialogue with Sergei about the importance of recognizing aging as a disease, global regulatory framework, and intricacies of funding in longevity research.

The learning journey continued as host Max Unfried led a conversation with Aubrey De Grey, Caitlin Lewis, and Kelsey Moody, focused on mouse rejuvenation. The purpose of extending lifespan in mice is twofold: 1) convince the world that rejuvenation is possible and 2) identify interventions that may translate to humans. Researchers on the space discussed recent developments in mouse studies, concerns with the interventions, and approaches to interpreting survivorship data. 

In VitaDAO’s next TwitterSpace event, Max Unfried was joined by experts Mahdi Moqri, Kristen McGreevy, David Meyer, and Raghav Sehgal to explore the latest developments in epigenetic clocks. Mahdi Moqri aptly defined epigenetics as “an additional layer on top of your DNA that controls cell identity.” The epigenome plays a pivotal role in both development and aging. During this space, experts dissected the differences between first, second, and third generation epigenetic clocks. 

Following Zuzalu, a pop-up city dedicated to life extension, VitaDAO has continued to delve into the creation of longevity network cities. Niklas Anzinger, Laurence Ion, Tom Howard, and Max Unfried discussed the practicalities of establishing network longevity cities, states, and countries. In early 2024, VitaDAO is excited to be a part of coordinating Vitalia, a pop-up city that will center around the belief that “life is good, death is bad.”

To wrap up the month, Alex Dobrin joined Ines Silva, Laura Minquini, and Estéfano Pinilla from AthenaDAO to discuss the work AthenaDAO is doing to advance women’s reproductive longevity. Recognizing the lack of funding for female related conditions, AthenaDAO has been advocating for and funding women’s health research. They are currently conducting a token auction!

🧪VITA-FAST Updates 

Can you believe it’s only been two months since the launch of the VITA-FAST token? They say time flies when you're having fun, and researching autophagy is indeed exhilarating! The launch, which garnered an 1700% oversubscription with $620k in bids, marked a revolutionary shift in how individuals can engage with longevity research. 

Since the launch, there have been two VITA-FAST governance proposals:

1. VFDP-1: The election of a Project Lead for the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that governs the Discovering Novel Autophagy Activators IP-NFT.
2. VFDP-2: Agreement to enter into a contractual relationship with Camp Consulting.

This month, Dr. Viktor Korolchuk spoke at the first VITA-FAST Community Call. The Korolchuk Lab is committed to identifying compounds that could potentially kickstart autophagy and rejuvenate aged cells. During the call, VITA-FAST token holders were informed that the lab has ordered commercially available analogs and screened them on two of three autophagy assays. Some of the analogs have show promising results and are even outperforming their predecessors! The lab is now considering engaging an external medicinal chemist to validate which chemical families to pursue. As the project moves closer to target identification, the lab hinted at the future of a hackathon to leverage the DeSci community’s expertise in predicting where the mechanism of action lies. Exciting progress indeed!

🌎Back to Back: Conference After Conference

Our Vitalians have been keeping busy! This month began with the Longevity+DeSci Summit NYC. Here, VitaDAO members Todd White, Eleanor Davies, Laurence Ion, and Niklas Anzinger took the stage. Todd delivered a keynote talk titled "A New Epoch in Longevity Science? Preparing for a Longevity Future with DeSci,” advocating for decentralized science by highlighting the shortcomings of “traditional” science. 

Shortly after Longevity+DeSci Summit NYC, Eleanor Davies and Max Unfried represented VitaDAO at the Longevity Summit Dublin. They gave an insightful presentations on the ways VitaDAO is pioneering longevity research funding and ways the internet can be used to create a decentralized network state.

The whirlwind of a month concluded with the 10th Aging Research and Drug Discovery Meeting. VitaDAO members Tim Peterson, Estefano Pinilla, Maria Marinova, Eleanor Davies, Max Unfried, and Paolo Binetti spoke at the conference, even shared some VitaDAO swag (check out the pictures below!). 

🗳️Transfer Your Voting Power

Introducing delegated voting! In VDP-65, the VitaDAO community voted to allow $VITA token holders to delegate their voting rights to a delegate. Simply put, delegation is a transfer of voting power. Delegation is great for $VITA holders who don’t have the bandwidth to actively participate in the governance and evaluation of VitaDAO’s research proposals. The DAO is currently accepting applications for delegates on Discourse. One can delegate their voting power to candidates directly on Snapshot. 

📣Community Approved: What YOU voted for!  

Thanks to the support of the VitaDAO community, multiple proposals successfully passed this month! Notable passed proposals include:  

• VDP-110: Allocation of $10,000 USD to fund another batch of VitaDAO Longevity Fellows with need-based micro-grants of up to $2,000 USD.
• VDP-106: Clarifications to the guidelines for applicants to and reviewers of projects VitaDAO funds.
• VDP-111: An outline of a VITA-FAST governance model and the election of a steward by VITA-FAST token holders. 
• VDP-103: Funding $91,300 towards engineering an arginine suppressor tRNA that can specifically recognize these nonsense mutations, restoring normal protein translation. 
• VDP-112: An assessment of Cyclarity Therapeutics, an early stage biotechnology company developing computationally designed novel cyclodextrin drug molecules to extraction of toxic biomolecules that accumulate with age.

💪Exercise Your Right to Vote

Visit VitaDAO’s governance hub (Discourse) to engage with, vote on, and discuss proposals before they are moved to Snapshot. Your input is invaluable, and together, we can shape the future of VitaDAO and decide how best to accelerate decentralized science.

😆VitaDAO Meme Competition

Looking for a good laugh? Want to work out your zygomaticus? This summer, VitaDAO hosted a Twitter meme competition, with a $VITA reward for the top three submitted memes. The only rule: the meme had to relate to longevity and aging. The submissions did not disappoint! Head over to VitaDAO’s Twitter to enjoy some clever community generated memes.

🥇First Place: 

🥈 Second Place: 

🥉Third Place:

🤝Thanks for Reading! 

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