How Athena DAO is funding the underfunded: Women’s Health Research
This summer has shown us what Beyonce has always known: Girls run the world. Taylor Swift Tickets are selling for over $1000, and Beyonce’s tour was so successful that it’s said to have boosted inflation in Stockholm. And then there’s Barbie, the most successful movie of the year, raking in more than $1 billion.
Women control a lot of spending power. Yet, not much money is spent on investigating our health. If you have ever read Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (and if you have not, you should), you’ll know that our world is built with men in mind. It reaches from bathrooms all the way to public transport ticket pricing.
And, of course, health. Did you know that women are much more likely to display less common symptoms during heart attacks? And that’s just one example of many. I still find it quite fascinating how often I came across guys expecting a woman to take hormonal birth control because… well… they couldn’t. Of course, they had never been on such a hormonal ride as most of us go through naturally every month. It’s only when you start messing with your hormones that you realize what a huge role they play.
I tried various pills earlier in my life, and all they did was make my life worse. Either I gained a lot of weight or lost my joy. So I stopped. It took 6 months for my body even to start going back to normal.
Not even the gyn would talk a lot about all the downsides and the outsized impact hormones can have. Once you start digging into these topics, you realize, there isn’t as much research as you’d expect — considering half the world’s population is female.
I have a friend suffering from endometriosis, and it’s still so little understood. We know how atoms work on a quantum level, but we cannot help millions of women suffering from a chronic disease.
Turns out it’s a systemic issue. Women’s health is just not considered as profitable as something like looking for a cure for cancer. But what if it is?
Women control 80% of the health care decisions at home. And thanks to Beyonce, Barbie, and Taylor, we know that we also have spending power. The logical assumption is that if there were medicines that could alleviate our chronic diseases or help us manage hormones, we’d spend money on those too. I know I would. And so would my friends who are struggling with it, from those just going through menopause to those with endometriosis.
I’ve been a little disillusioned in recent days with the state of web3 where we end up fetishizing the big TradFi people, hope for the SEC to approve an ETF to pump our bags, or try to get some enterprise to build a permissioned chain on xyz protocol — for what exactly? Mostly for token price to go up. It doesn’t help that everyone and their granny seems to be chasing hype instead of maybe considering the demand side of their business.
Anyway, what does that have to do with women's Health? Quite a lot in terms of my optimism for the space.
Enter Athena DAO
One of the areas I see a lot of potential in to actually make a positive irl impact is decentralized science. It’s pretty obvious that conflicts of interest arise when research is funded mostly by big corporations with their own agenda.
Athena DAO is part of the bigger DeSci space and focuses on funding research into Women’s Health using a DAO. If you think about it, DAOs are simply a mechanism to rally people around a common cause, secure funding, and have them coordinate and share value.
Athena applies this to the underfunded field of women’s health research making women agents of change. Through Athena, even someone like me with a not-science background (I studied linguistics) can vote and fund research.
The goal of Athena is to become a sustainable engine for research that funds and incubates women’s health research projects. Its initial focus is on the projects that are most underfunded but have disproportionate potential to change lives — and to also make money 💸
You see, Women’s Health isn’t just a charitable endeavor. As the Girl Economy has illustrated this year, we have spending power. Whoever taps into that the right way will have some commercial success.
Athena has already funded its first research project, which is investigating Ovarian aging. Now you might wonder:
How does one even invest in Research IP?
Most of the agreements around science, just like a vast majority of other legal agreements in this world, are on paper base and involve a bunch of lawyers. The same goes for Research IP. Fortunately, the team at Molecule has found a way to bring IP onchain using NFTs.
They ran the first Proof-of-Concept of their IP NFT framework, which saw Vita DAO purchase sublicenses to a medical research IP using a combination of legal documents and onchain transactions.
Who votes and how?
Like in most DAOs, Athena is governed via a governance token: $ATH. It’s distributed via an auction on bio.xyz to prevent frontrunning and allow people to purchase at their convenience.
Token holders get to vote on research projects to invest in, commercialization strategies, and the moves of the DAO. Currently, the heavy load of Athena is managed by the Athena Core, a group of quasi-full-time members who work for the DAO but, importantly, do not have special rights.
They are supported by working groups which are split into Science & Dealflow, Comms & Awareness, Ops, Governance, and Tokenomics.
So far, the Athena team has raised $100k from Bio.xyz and $250k from early supporters to invest in 3 different IP NFTs.
It’s worth mentioning that token holders do not own the IP that is held by the DAO as an entity. Nevertheless, they have a say in what is acquired and, consequently, which topics are researched, leading hopefully to actual products.
In the future, Athena plans to expand on research topics and amplify awareness of Women’s Health, the need to fund it, and the commercial potential. Other things on the roadmap include IP spin-offs and clinical trial recruitment.
You can learn more about them on their website:
Disclosure: I bid on ATH tokens and hope that more people will. I know that web3 isn’t really a spot where there are many women and lots of products are built more with guys in mind, but here’s to hoping.
Don’t fade the girl economy.
Seriously though, makes you wonder what the world would look like if we didn’t yolo into Ponzi schemes but focus more on funding things that make a difference.
Enough from me. Go fund some public goods or research with your yield farming rewards.
