Eleanor Davies, Global DeSci Lead at Sei Development Foundation, on how DeSci can reshape funding for aging science and healthspan.
Science in 2025 is deeply under threat. While a fortunate few labs at prestigious institutions continue to pull in grants, the collapse of funding from the United States government threatens to crush an entire generation of scientific talent. The NSF faces potential cuts of up to 66% of its current funding, while the NIH faces a potential 40% slash to its budget. Spending cuts of this size would eliminate entire institutes. Meanwhile, venture capital in biotech has entered what analysts delicately term a “period of sustainable investing,” meaning that money has dried up for anyone not named ‘Flagship’ or sporting a résumé from Genentech’s C-suite. Fields like aging research, where we see even lower federal funding, are at even greater risk. Looking at the 2026 health budget policy, the National Institute on Aging (NIA), may see a 45.5% reduction in grant funding, a 24.5% decline in research center support, and a 22% reduction in intramural research funding compared with 2025.
With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) catalyzing the drug discovery process, we are seeing more emerging research areas that may hold the key to advancing human healthspan and lifespan. However, under these macroeconomic conditions, the advancement of underfunded yet promising fields such as gerophysics, comparative biology and partial reprogramming, which might hold the keys to reversing aging, could be stunted. Unlike other areas in biotechnology, longevity is a field that no traditional VC will touch, given 10-20 year timelines to liquidity and a higher risk profile. As a result, longitudinal studies have a greater dependence on public funding. Now, the field is in an exceptionally vulnerable position due to changes in government-level spending.
But hope is not lost. DeSci at its best offers a fundamental reimagining of the current system. Forget the governance theatre of DeSci’s first act. DeSci V2 is more ambitious – and realistic. It is the construction of a parallel financial infrastructure for the sciences – longevity funding rails – that operates by different rules. Think of it as building Raphael’s School of Athens, but onchain – a place where capital formation moves faster than grant cycles, and where postdocs working on senolytics or epigenetic reprogramming can afford both rent and reagents. It’s a new way of looking at independently funding research deemed a priority to the people. After all, aging is the #1 risk factor for most diseases. DeSci is democratizing access to resources and challenging the status quo.
The Valley of Death gets deeper
In February 2025, 168 NSF employees received pink slips in a single morning. It became clear that NSF and the NIH – which are responsible for providing grants to universities – were far from immune to broader federal budget cuts. Furthermore, the limited grants that would continue to go to universities would not be like the grants of the past. Government grants typically allow the recipients to allocate a certain portion of the funding to indirect costs (i.e., overhead costs). Along with the proposed budget cuts, the federal government also indicated that it would cap indirect costs at 15% of any grant. Institutions, which used to be able to allocate up to 40% of any grant to indirect costs, are now no longer able to subsidize overhead costs with grants. With all of these funding sources drying up, universities are now limiting or even halting admissions for many of their graduate programs.
The human cost to these cuts reads like a generational tragedy – and it’s one we cannot afford. One postdoc, promised an NIH diversity supplement, learned via email that the funding had evaporated overnight: “I regret to have to inform you that NIH has instructed us not to issue any diversity supplements that are pending.”
The impact on early-career scientists cannot be overstated. Principal investigators report advertising postdoc positions for months without receiving a single qualified application. The days of writing checks to smart graduate students with interesting ideas are gone, replaced by a flight to quality that feels more like a stampede to safety.
The private sector offers no refuge. Despite headlines about AI revolutionizing drug discovery, longevity biotech venture funding remains incredibly selective and risk-off. Of 416 funding rounds in 2024, the vast majority went to companies with proven leadership teams and de-risked assets. Later-stage longevity is experiencing a moment in venture, however, the field cannot develop sustainably based on generalist and corporate venture capital in search of the next trend. Aside from a few select specialist funds with extended lifespans to achieve success, the longevity field remains overlooked and underfunded. We need to get more creative than the existing solutions to advance the field. For longevity investors, this creates both a gap and an opportunity: those willing to embrace new funding models could be the ones to capture breakthroughs that traditional capital overlooks.
Why traditional models cannot scale
The crisis runs deeper than budget cuts. Traditional biotech funding operates on a tournament model: many compete, few win, and the losers get nothing. An assistant professor might spend six months writing an R01 grant with a 22% chance of success. Those six months writing the grant are six months that the professor is not doing research, not mentoring students, and not advancing human knowledge. If rejected (and 78% are), they start over.
This system made sense when success rates were higher and competition less fierce. In the 1990s, NIH R01 success rates hovered around 32%. Today’s 22% rate transforms persistence from virtue to delusion. Over 50% of NIH funding flows to 10% of institutions, creating scientific dynasties where pedigree matters more than potential.
Emerging markets brim with underused talent. Brazil hosts over 1,400 VC-backed biotech startups. India’s generic drug manufacturers have demonstrated world-class chemistry capabilities. These regions remain excluded from the global research conversation, because they lack access to the old boys’ network that controls traditional funding.
Longevity’s unique funding crisis
Aging research faces a perfect storm of funding dysfunction. The NIA budget, already representing less than 1% of NIH funding, faces proportional cuts that could eliminate entire aging research programs. Meanwhile, longevity biotech confronts the ‘timeline problem’ – geroprotectors require decades of study, but investment cycles demand returns in 3-5 years. The result: forced or premature exits – a mismatch between long development cycles and funds’ short exit horizons, leading to a high risk of underperformance or loss, if key milestones or approvals have not been achieved.
Why does this matter beyond the lab? Populations in the US, Europe and Asia are aging rapidly. By 2050, one in six people worldwide will be over 65, creating an inverted population pyramid where fewer working-age adults can support a growing demographic of elderly dependents. This is already putting healthcare systems under strain, chronic disease costs will be pushed to breaking point, while shrinking workforces threaten economic productivity. Breakthroughs in longevity biotech – from geroprotectors that extend healthspan to biomarkers that may keep populations healthier for longer – are not a luxury. They are a societal necessity if we are to sustain healthcare, pensions and economic resilience in an aging world.
The Onchain School of Athens
DeSci V2 proposes a different model. Instead of winner-takes-all, imagine funding markets with access to continuous working capital. Instead of geographic gatekeeping, imagine borderless collaboration. Instead of year-long grant cycles, imagine capital deployment in weeks.
We imagine a system where milestone-based funding releases capital as researchers hit predetermined targets. Overhead drops from 70% to 5%, meaning more money actually funds science versus administration. Continuous funding models enabled by token liquidity eliminate the feast-or-famine cycles that plague traditional research – a particular pain point in aging research.
But the real innovation lies in the human coordination layer. Traditional science already operates through invisible networks, researchers who share ideas, critique work, and collaborate on problems.
Imagine a prediction market for scientific reproducibility. In the longevity field, that could mean testing whether animal model studies in caloric restriction, rapalogs or partial reprogramming are likely to replicate before vast sums are poured into trials. Markets aggregate distributed knowledge, identifying potential failures before resources are wasted. Studies show prediction markets achieve 71% accuracy in forecasting replication, far better than peer review’s dismal track record.
The implications cascade. A researcher in São Paulo can collaborate with a team in Seoul without either institution’s bureaucracy interfering. A brilliant undergraduate in Mumbai can contribute to frontier research without waiting for acceptance to a PhD program. Knowledge flows like capital in DeFi – permissionlessly, and at the speed of the internet.
AI x DeSci
The convergence of AI and DeSci creates possibilities that neither could achieve alone. AI-discovered drugs show significantly higher success rates in Phase I trials, compared to 40-65% for traditional approaches. Centralized institutions struggle to provide this at scale.
DeSci infrastructure can solve these bottlenecks. Federated learning protocols allow pharmaceutical companies to collaborate without sharing proprietary data. The MELLODDY project demonstrated this, with ten pharma companies achieving 12-20% improvements in model efficiency by training on 2.6 billion shared data points. Each company kept their data private while benefiting from collective intelligence.
Decentralized compute networks make AI accessible to smaller research groups. Instead of paying AWS prices, labs can access GPU resources from networks like Akash or Prime Intellect at a fraction of the cost.
AI can help solve DeSci’s quality control challenges. Machine learning models trained on historical data can identify promising research directions, flag potential reproducibility issues, match researchers with complementary expertise.
Three futures for DeSci x longevity biotech
The path forward in DeSci is plural, each addressing different aspects of the broken system:
At the core is a digital Schelling point for science, an onchain School of Athens, where the world’s brightest minds gather virtually to tackle grand challenges. Funding flows to ideas through DeFi mechanisms preventing plutocracy, encouraging participation. Continuous funding markets could sustain longitudinal biomarker studies, which are often too slow or expensive for traditional VC. Similar to traditional crowdfunding platforms, the scientific community, including the general public, may support research projects they deem compelling. This bypasses traditional institutions, reducing dependency on limited public funding, catalysing the funding process.
Engagement, curiosity and joy are sustained in this community via collaborative gamification, perhaps a kind of “prediction republic” – a massive multiplayer game where scientists bet on which research will replicate, which drugs will succeed in trials and which theories will stand the test of time. In longevity research, for example, prediction markets could assess the rampant reproducibility crisis of animal model studies in aging. Their predictions are progressively refined by training models based on the results, improving the fidelity of science.
Value creation emerges from a venture studio model – onchain biotech companies with wet lab work outsourced to the best candidate. A group identifies a promising drug target through community discussion. In longevity, that might mean a community spotting a novel biomarker of biological age or a target for senolytics, then funding early validation. If successful, value flows back to the researchers and investors who made it possible. Federated AI learning could accelerate biomarker discovery across aging cohorts globally – combining datasets from the UK Biobank to NUS aging studies, to Japan’s ORCLS research, for example, without compromising privacy. When the drug succeeds, value flows back to those who participated.
The choice before us
The Sapien Open Science Fund signals commitment to making DeSci V2 a reality. But capital without community is just venture capital by another name. The real opportunity lies in creating structures that align incentives across the entire research stack.
Science deserves better than its current state. DeSci V2 might be the catalyst that sparks a renaissance. The School of Athens wasn’t a building, it was an idea. The idea that human knowledge advances through open discourse, truth emerges from debate, and wisdom belongs to all rather than the few. DeSci V2 resurrects this idea for the digital age. For investors, the message is clear: healthy aging isn’t just a scientific frontier, it’s an economic imperative. Backing new models like DeSci V2 isn’t philanthropy – it’s positioning early in a sector that will define the future of human health and productivity.
Join us in building the future of science. The future of human healthspan and the promise of longevity science depend on it.
About Eleanor Davies
Eleanor Davies is Global DeSci Lead at Sei Development Foundation. A leading contributor to the DeSci movement, Eleanor previously helped launch and led the investment arm of VitaDAO, the first tokenized longevity venture studio. She also served as Operating Partner at Cerebrum, and was COO at Convexity Labs (previously known as LabDAO).
