Crowdfunding and DeSci

Traditional funding systems such as grants and venture capital tend to suffer from a culture of risk aversion. Funding frequently goes to research that has the greatest expected chance of success and thus the most likelihood of being published in scientific journals. Unfortunately, this leads to a situation that favors incremental progress, while more ambitious research, often with game-changing potential, fails to get funded.
Combine this problem with the fierce level of competition in the grant system, and it all adds up to potentially transformative technologies being left to languish. The research needed to defeat aging, and in doing so age-related diseases, is no exception to this problem. Innovative ideas and research directions that could move us closer to understanding and bringing aging under medical control need more funding. This dynamic has been called out by some of the leading researchers at top universities who highlight the fact that they have to abandon exciting, potentially groundbreaking studies because they are forced to go where the grant money is.
This is why we launched our own crowdfunding platform in 2015, which specifically supports aging and rejuvenation research. We have raised over $750,000 for important aging research and have worked with institutions including Harvard Medical School and SENS Research Foundation. The research we have helped to fund includes mitochondrial repair, DNA damage, functional biomarkers of aging, and a rapamycin human trial.
We support the decentralized science, or “DeSci” movement, which aims to increase scientific funding, to free knowledge from silos, and to cut out profit-motivated intermediaries such as publisher conglomerates that lock scientific data behind paywalls.
As part of our DeSci strategy, Lifespan.io is working on a variety of innovative Web3 efforts to raise funds and awareness for research aimed at extending healthy human lifespan. This includes, organizing the first-of-its-kind decentralized clinical trial for digital therapies targeting dementia, pioneering new forms of perpetual and NFT-based fundraising for public goods, and creating a massive-scale metaversal game to raise hundreds of millions for aging research.
On Lifespan.io, researchers can launch projects related to longevity or age-related diseases and receive funds from contributors to fulfill their goals. Contributors, in turn, are able to exercise agency in the development of potentially life-changing research and to receive rewards specified by the project creators. This works in a similar way to Kickstarter and other crowdfunding systems, only in this case, the funds go to aging and rejuvenation research.
If you have a project you’d like to crowdfund, please get in touch with us. We offer active support. And because we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and fiscally sponsor all project donations, contributors will automatically receive a tax receipt for donations made to your project. There are some potentially game-changing medical technologies on the horizon that could be truly transformative for healthcare and how we treat age-related diseases. By sponsoring, democratizing and funding aging research, we aim to accelerate progress towards this important goal for all humankind.