Quantum Biology Institute Receives $1.2 Million Grant to Advance Research in Quantum Biology

A $1.2 million grant from the Quantum Biology Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to the Quantum Biology Institute (QBI) will accelerate foundational research into one of the most consequential scientific questions of our time and might bring closer a future in which cell phones can be used to treat medical conditions and weak magnetic fields can enhance biomanufacturing and inform drug discovery.

This pioneering, interdisciplinary effort seeks to determine whether quantum states inside living cells last long enough to influence biological function — a question whose confirmation would reshape medicine, manufacturing, and our understanding of life itself. The grant represents a new model for funding the kind of high-risk, high-reward foundational research that conventional mechanisms consistently underinvest in.

"This support allows QBI to pursue the most important question we know how to ask: whether quantum mechanics is not just incidentally present in living systems, but functionally decisive," said Todd Thaxton, Chief Executive Officer of QBI. "The answer will reshape our understanding of life — and open a new frontier in how we treat disease, design therapies, and engineer biology."

The research QBI pursues sits at the intersection of physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering. A growing body of experimental evidence suggests that quantum phenomena — including electron spin superpositions and quantum tunneling— may play a functionally decisive role in processes as fundamental as how birds navigate, how enzymes catalyze reactions, and how weak magnetic fields influence cell growth and differentiation. Understanding these mechanisms at the molecular level would give scientists and clinicians an entirely new set of tools. Instead of acting through chemical pathways alone, these tools would act through the quantum-level forces that may ultimately govern them.

"Quantum biology has the power to change our understanding of life around us," said Clarice Aiello, President of the Scientific Advisory Board and Chair of the Board of QBI. "This grant reflects what becomes possible when a global community organizes around a shared scientific mission — and around the recognition that the deepest breakthroughs in the biological sciences  will probably come from understanding life at its most fundamental level."

The grant also advances QBI's commitment to open science. QBI is structured to develop shared experimental infrastructure, including shielded environments for magnetic field experiments and novel spectroscopic tools, that will be made available to researchers across institutions. Its open-science publishing pipeline ensures that findings are accessible to the global research community from the moment they are produced.

"The influence of weak magnetic fields on biological systems is one of the most empirically striking and least understood phenomena in science," said Alessandro Lodesani, Chief Operating Officer of QBI. "We have seen measurable effects on cell growth, reactive oxygen species, and enzyme activity in multiple experimental contexts, and strong theoretical grounds — in the radical pair mechanism — for believing these effects are quantum in origin. What the field has lacked is the instrumentation, the methodological standards, and the coordinated institutional infrastructure to resolve these questions definitively. This grant moves us closer to that resolution."

The Quantum Biology DAO is part of the BIO Protocol ecosystem, a decentralized science platform that enables community-owned organizations to fund, govern, and accelerate scientific research. The DAO supports the field of quantum biology through community building, open governance, and research grants — demonstrating that decentralized science is not an abstraction, but a working model for organizing global scientific ambition around shared goals.

Special thanks to Alessandro Lodesani for serving as QBI's liaison to the Quantum Biology DAO and for his dedication in ensuring the success of our grant request. This milestone would not have been possible without his effort and commitment.

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About the Quantum Biology Institute: The Quantum Biology Institute is an independent research organization with an open-science ethos that is dedicated to confirming or refuting the Quantum Biology Hypothesis: namely, that quantum states last long enough inside cells to influence biological function. QBI pursues this question through rigorous, interdisciplinary, and transparent science, building the shared infrastructure, experimental standards, and collaborative ecosystem the field requires. More information is available at https://www.quantumbiology.org/ and https://www.quantumbiology.eco/.

About the Quantum Biology DAO: The Quantum Biology DAO is a community-owned collective that supports the field of quantum biology with community building, governance tokens, and an open competition for research grants. The DAO operates through a decentralized science model that enables collective participation in funding and in advancing scientific research. More information is available at https://www.quantumbiology.xyz/.