The global nootropics market is currently ~10B USD, yet the (unreliable) data on nootropic safety and efficacy is loosely scattered on the internet in various databases and forums. Many consumers report their personal experience on the internet, promoting a nascent decentralized community of nootropics experimenters, self experimenting and self reporting; however, they have no singular place to curate and share their data in a structured way, so potential users don’t have a single place to search for structured nootropics data. In addition, many nootropics users are forced to experiment broadly with various nootropics and often buy entire bottles of a substance that they end up not responding to, wasting both time and resources. A Nootropics community could facilitate more efficient onboarding and experimentation to help members more efficiently arrive at their optimal stack.
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What is a BioDAO?
BioDAOs are community-owned scientific research networks. They typically focus on a specific scientific or medical area (nootropics) and use the power of globally distributed stakeholders (e.g., patients, scientists and operators) to accelerate the R&D process and develop and bring new products to their members. BioDAOs uniquely empower their participants. Members pool together resources (data, capital, labor) for the mutually-held mission of the DAO. By sharing resources, these communities reduce the cost of innovation and time to commercialization.
Successful bioDAOs often emerge from strong online communities, typically focused on underserved research areas by traditional mechanisms. BioDAOs can uniquely tap a long-tail of contributors in their networks, whereas traditional organizations often rely on full-time hiring. DAOs enable a flexible work model, enabling people with full-time jobs -- like world-leading professors, postdocs, researchers -- to help source, diligence, finance and operate biotech assets in their free time as part of the DAO. Part of their incentive for contributing is shared ownership of the DAO’s IP. This opportunity is something missing from traditional biotech, which often revolves around closed scientific funding and incentive models.
As a collective, bioDAOs develop scientific IP, much like a Focused Research Organization (FRO) or research institution. BioDAOs are uniquely positioned to outcompete other entities by having a tight feedback loop between users and creators of biotech products (nootropics). Any proceeds from selling products created can flow back to bioDAO treasuries to fund and translate the next generation of R&D, further advancing the bioDAO’s mission.
Below is an example of the kinds of challenges and potential initiatives for a Nootropics-focused DAO.
Challenge
We are moving into an economy where individuals are relying on others for experimentation. Web2 tools brought us into a world of content creation, where we can follow creators and curators who spend more time “experimenting” and reading articles and filtering them for our consumption. Traditional web2 platforms match us to these content creators' interests or ideals based on algorithms that use likes and attention as inputs. Newer platforms, such as Beli, require users to rank order their favorite restaurants, and allow users to view exact correlations between their own restaurant preferences, and those of influencers. This same model generalizes to other consumer products. Nootropics are a wide range of natural or synthetic supplements, drugs, and other substances that improve cognitive function, particularly boosting mood, executive functions, attention, memory, creativity, or motivation in healthy individuals. Despite several of these metrics likely being quantifiable, users typically evaluate them subjectively.
There is a thriving community of individuals looking to optimize cognition and productivity with supplements. A largely fragmented community traversing various online forums labeling themselves as biohacking, nootropics, quantified self, and many others. Though this community is strong, the tools available to them are lacking. For example, the subreddit page r/Nootropics is over 330,000 members strong, each sharing their personal experiences experimenting with various compounds. Like most medical interventions, responses are mixed with certain individuals benefiting from specific nootropics while others with false hope are disappointed when their experience doesn’t match that of others. In addition, there are a swath of nootropics brands emerging with proprietary cocktails investing significantly into branding and marketing, rather than R&D. Clearly, more structured clinical research is needed to develop scientific rigor around these interventions and bring precision medicine to cognition optimization. One gaping problem is that many of these therapies are unpatentable or off-patent, making raising funds to run such research highly challenging.
Solution
With the advent of BioDAOs, however, this research may be logistically feasible. The objective of NootropicsDAO is to enable gathering structured population data of individual use of nootropics. This vision will be enabled by five key initiatives: 1) determining user nootropic preferences, 2) decentralized clinical trials, 3) n-of-1 trials, 4) decentralized data analytics, and 5) patented cognitive subtypes and nootropic cocktails.
Decentralized Clinical Trials
Decentralized clinical trials will consist of trial protocols proposed by and stake-voted on by the community to ensure funds are allocated toward questions of immediate interest to the DAO. DAO members can decide to fund and/or participate in these trial protocols, which have the basic structure consisting of 1) inclusion/exclusion criteria for participants, 2) an intervention (caffeine) and dosing schedule (200 mg once per day), and 3) a cognitive assessment (short-term memory test administered 1 hr after the supplement is taken). Once a protocol has reached sufficient funding, the DAO core members will coordinate distribution of the intervention to the trial participants and use randomization tools to ensure double-blind control implementation. A fraction of the funds raised will go to the individual who proposed the protocol for suggesting a successful proposal and a fraction above costs will go to the treasury as a sustainability fee.
Trial Details
Trial participants will be sent a packet to their home along with instructions for how to participate. In order to receive a reward, participants must follow all instructions in the protocol to reward effort and participation rather than a particular trial outcome. Participants will take intervention or placebo, confirmed via timestamped footage of unpacking each dose with a QR code, which will be submitted for verification. Following administration of the intervention, participants will participate in digital cognition tests using providers such as Cambridge Cognition, Neurotrack, Cogstate, Cognifit, CleverMe, TotalBrain, or others.
To complement the objective data, users may contribute subjective data around how they felt and performed that day (outside of the formal cognitive test), such as with questionnaires about mood and subjective experience (Brief Mood Introspection Survey). Results will be deidentified and uploaded to decentralized data storage, where they will be token-gated to ensure only DAO members can access the results. Each time the results are accessed, a small fee will be paid to participants and sponsors of the trial to increase data acquisition economic sustainability.
N-of-1 Trials Details
In addition to more formal decentralized trials that are driven by funders, n-of-1 trials will be driven participant-first, a more organic model for self-experimenters. N-of-1 trials will consist of individuals applying scientific rigor to their self-experimentation. Each individual will a priori determine their own trial protocol - and may use discussion forums to refine it with the help of others. In addition, they may be able to recruit participants to participate in their trial to increase the sample size. The user experience will be almost identical to the decentralized clinical trial model, but provides an alternative route of data acquisition that more experimental members will favor to have higher confidence predictions of their own response to specific nootropics. Participants will be able to order whitelisted nootropics from Amazon via an Amazon Influencers link. The revenue stream from Amazon sales will flow directly into the DAO treasury and allow the DAO to subsidize and provide quadratic funding for decentralized and n-of-1 trials.
Long Term Business Model
A longer-term business model will be development of compute-to-data infrastructure to support biomarker discovery applied to the trials data, which is both privacy preserving to the individual and accretive to the DAO by ensuring data is secure and cannot be downloaded off-chain and sold on secondary markets. A large potential value proposition to future members of NootropicsDAO is prediction of their likely response to each nootropic, and optimal cocktail and dosing schedule of nootropics. Developing such models from easily attainable input data is essential to enabling this - such as Myers-Briggs or genetic data (CYP1A2 haplotype predicts caffeine metabolism). In addition to existing tools, creating an incentive for neuroscientists to develop novel assessments that predict responsiveness to nootropics and determine various cognitive subtypes may be additional capabilities of the DAO.
Personalized / Branded Nootropics
With determination of cognitive subtypes to categorize individuals comes the opportunity to develop tailored cocktails for individuals of each subtype. For example, with a test that’s able to subtype individuals into Nervous Nelly, Lazy Larry, Chaotic Carl, Analytical Anne. Nervous Nelly may need a higher dose of analgesics than Lazy Larry, who may need a slightly higher dose of caffeine to increase his productivity. Chaotic Carl may need a higher dose of choline than Analytical Anne, and so forth. These cognitive subtypes are of course a spectrum and likely overlapping, but the ability to capture them with a test and associate their results with precision nootropics for optimizing performance is non-obvious and patentable, for which the DAO can hold and monetize this IP. Thesis has demonstrated there is a market for more personalized nootropics already, and the IP coming out of the DAO can be licensed to them. Another income stream to the DAO will be fee-for-service participation in trials for nootropics suppliers like Thesis, Kin Euphorics, and Sourse who stand to benefit from more data supporting their products.
Our mission at BIO is to accelerate a network of bioDAOs. Building on previous bioDAO successes, BIO is opening applications for our upcoming second cohort, which is planned to launch in Q4 2024. BioDAO applications will be initially filtered by Program Operators and ultimately presented to BIO token holders, who stake on the bioDAOs they want accepted into the BIO Incubation Program.
