Months af­ter Pfiz­er Ven­tures put a de­cen­tral­ized co­op­er­a­tive on the map by an­nounc­ing a $500,000 in­fu­sion in­to its mis­sion of fund­ing hu­man longevi­ty re­search, the group — Vi­taDAO — is ty­ing the bow around a $4.1 mil­lion fundrais­ing round.

As its name im­plies, Vi­taDAO calls it­self a DAO, or de­cen­tral­ized au­tonomous or­ga­ni­za­tion. Like many oth­er such groups, it aims to run on a rel­a­tive­ly flat, glob­al struc­ture us­ing con­tracts on blockchains and cryp­to-tied to­kens in hopes of prov­ing a new way to fund big ideas and bridge the val­ley of death for very ear­ly-stage re­search on an­ti-ag­ing.

The goal at Vi­taDAO, ac­cord­ing to Lau­rence Ion, dealflow stew­ard, is to work with sci­en­tists to test their ideas and get in on po­ten­tial­ly valu­able in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty pre-seed, or even pre-start­up — help­ing push those projects along and reap the ben­e­fits if they pay off, such as by sell­ing the IP to a ven­ture in­vestor or hold­ing eq­ui­ty in a biotech spin­out.

Sci­en­tists can ap­ply for fund­ing by sub­mit­ting pro­pos­als on its web­site. While a core team and a net­work of ex­perts would vet the pro­pos­als, the de­ci­sions to in­vest are ul­ti­mate­ly put to a vote by all to­ken hold­ers in the 9,000-strong com­mu­ni­ty, ac­cord­ing to Ion (and that in­cludes Pfiz­er). Pfiz­er pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed that it sees it­self as both a stake­hold­er and a po­ten­tial ac­quir­er of fu­ture IP.

So far, Vi­taDAO has di­rect­ed about $3 mil­lion to mul­ti­ple re­search projects, with tick­et sizes rang­ing from $250,000 to $1 mil­lion.

“The thing is that 250k is quite a lot for do­ing some killer ex­per­i­ments,” Ion said.

In a lot of ways, it’s not un­like aca­d­e­m­ic grants — but Ion said Vi­taDAO’s process promis­es to be more ef­fi­cient, with clin­i­cal trans­la­tion rather than knowl­edge find­ing as its main mis­sion.

Every­one who’s in­volved in re­view­ing the projects would get paid in ei­ther cash or Vi­taDAO to­kens, which they could sell in sec­ondary cryp­to ex­changes, he added.

Aside from Pfiz­er Ven­tures, Shine Cap­i­tal and LI Dig­i­tal al­so joined the round, along­side fel­low de­cen­tral­ized sci­ence or­ga­ni­za­tions Beaker DAO and Space­ship DAO; oth­er in­di­vid­ual longevi­ty en­thu­si­asts are al­so pitch­ing in, in­clud­ing Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan, gen­er­al part­ner at a16z and for­mer CTO of Coin­base, and Retro Bio­sciences CEO Joe Betts-LaCroix.

The mRNA player Moderna is further cementing its presence on the African continent.

Moderna announced on Thursday that it has finalized an agreement with Kenya’s government to partner up and bring an mRNA manufacturing facility to the east African nation. The new facility aims to manufacture up to 500 million doses of vaccines annually. Moderna also said the new facility will have the ability to spike its production capabilities to respond to public health emergencies on the continent or globally.

Catalent will be manufacturing a low-cost version of the opioid overdose treatment naloxone as part of a contract with Harm Reduction Therapeutics.

Catalent plans to manufacture the treatment at its facility in Morrisville, NC. No financial details on the deal were disclosed.

Harm Reduction was granted priority review status for the NDA on its spray last year. The company has been working on a naloxone product since 2017. It is anticipating approval in July of this year and a US launch in early 2024.

Last year, South African-based vaccine manufacturer Aspen Pharmacare was facing reports that it had not received a single order for its manufactured Covid-19 shots and that manufacturing lines were sitting idle. But now the vaccine producer is looking to turn things around.

Aspen’s disclosure of its financial results in March unveiled that manufacturing revenue had decreased by 12% to R 603 million ($33.8 million), which Lorraine Hill, Aspen Group’s COO, said is attributable to lower Covid vaccine sales.

Thermo Fisher Scientific is putting down more roots in the Bay Area.

The manufacturer opened the doors to a new cell therapy manufacturing facility next to the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center’s Mission Bay campus and on the university’s campus.

UCSF and Thermo Fisher have had a partnership since 2021, with the new site focusing on manufacturing cell therapeutics for certain cancers, including glioblastoma and multiple myeloma. The new site plans to use Thermo Fisher’s expertise in manufacturing services to help UCSF accelerate the development of cell therapies and eventually get them into the clinic, said Dan Herring, the general manager of cell therapy services at Thermo Fisher, in an interview with Endpoints News.

Dallas-based biotech Nanoscope Therapeutics unveiled Phase II results on its gene therapy for a rare eye disease Thursday morning.

In the RESTORE trial, 18 patients with retinitis pigmentosa got a gene therapy called MCO-010 while nine got placebo. On a vision test called the MLYMT, the treatment group had a one-point greater change over one year in their score compared to the placebo group, the primary endpoint of the study. However, the 95% confidence interval was 0.0 to 3.0, meaning the result was not statistically significant. The p-value was not provided.