Aiming to accelerate the translation of aging science into clinical practice, the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and Phenome Health joined forces today in a major strategic partnership. The result is the formation of the new Center for Phenomic Health at the Buck, where the two organizations will work together to advance healthspan for all.

Phenome has developed a platform combining whole-genome sequencing with a detailed profiling of the human phenome – the collection of dynamic and observable characteristics of an organism, ranging from blood markers to physiological signals. Using AI, Phenome integrates these data to shed light on the biology of aging and its associated diseases, and to identify interventions targeting the aging process.

Longevity.Technology: A nonprofit research organization founded by genomics pioneer Dr Lee Hood, Phenome’s data-driven approach to health and disease has clear synergies with the Buck, a global leader in research on aging. The new center will be co-led by Hood, who joins the Buck as its Chief Innovation Officer and Distinguished Professor, and Dr Eric Verdin, President and CEO of the Buck. We spoke exclusively with Hood and Verdin to learn more about what the partnership between the two organizations means.

September is whizzing by, and that means that it’s not long to go until the Longevity Investors Conference takes place in Switzerland. One of the speakers on Day 2 of this must-attend event is the philanthropist, entrepreneur and futurist David Gobel; the Methusaleh Foundation CEO will be presenting on  Lifting All Boats… Realizing precision personalized medicine via in vivitro modeling. An in vivitro approach combines traditional in vivo and in vitro methods, creating an ‘in life in glass’ platform.

Longevity.Technology: Co-founded with Dane Gobel and Aubrey de Grey, the Methuselah Foundation is a medical charity based in Springfield, Virginia. The foundation has invested millions of dollars in the research and development of regenerative medicine, and uses its platform to promote public understanding of longevity and ways to extending the healthy human lifespan.

Hevolution and Rosenkranz foundations provide $5m in matched funding for grants that champion high risk high reward aging research.
Established in 2021, Impetus Grants is dedicated to supporting innovative ideas in the aging space that might otherwise be overlooked by traditional funders – go bold, or go home.

Now Impetus has announced that it is set to launch a new round in August 2023, with Hevolution and Rosenkranz foundations each providing $5 million in matching funding. Thematically, says Impetus, the upcoming round will be open-ended, with a focus on high-risk high-reward kind of aging science.

Longevity.Technology: Impetus has successfully deployed over $24 million into scientific research projects, seeking out what they consider to be the most important problems in aging biology and awarding grants based on potential impact rather than possible pitfalls. Projects funded to date include aging-related clinical trials, biomarker research, and the development of novel tools and model organisms related to the aging process.

The human quest to remain young and live forever has long left the realm of fantasy to shake up the world of finance with a series of life-affirming jolts. Partly stoked by myths such as the fountain of youth and vampiric regeneration, ambitious startups from Silicon Valley, biotech, and pharma have blazed divergent roadmaps that might soon lead us to prolonged youth, extended lifespans, and immortality.

Collectively, these startups form the nascent anti-aging and longevity industry, which is set to reach a market value of US$64 billion by 2026 after a brisk six-year expansion at a compound annual rate of 6.1%, accordingto Research & Markets.

With a host of billionaires and institutional investors already bankrolling the industry, a number of standout players have launched pioneering research into how we just might halt the aging process and perhaps even deactivate death itself. The methodologies revealed so far are as varied and clever as the ambitious minds and financiers behind them. Think Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Think Larry Ellison and Larry Page. Think Alphabet and Nobel laureates.

Big bucks and big brains are definitely making this party too big a deal to ignore. With names such as the Methuselah Foundation, Juvenescence, and BioSplice Therapeutics, leading partygoers have chosen to hack different aging mechanisms, leading to a number of potential solutions: cellular reprogramming, mind uploading, body part replacement/cyborg technology, genetic editing/gene therapy, cryonics, anti-aging drugs/regenerative medicine, cloning, and young-blood injection.

British health tech startup Twinn Health recently emerged from stealth, boasting an AI-powered platform that analyzes MRI scans to detect preventable disease “earlier than ever before.” Starting with metabolic disease, the company’s AI platform leverages validated imaging biomarkers to improve diagnosis and treatment decisions.

With age-related frailty and liver disease also on its roadmap, Twinn Health is positioning itself squarely in the domain of longevity and preventive healthcare. The company is supported by WAED, a $500 million venture capital fund backed by Saudi Aramco, which invests in innovative tech-based startups.

Longevity.Technology: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used in healthcare for decades and is widely used in hospitals and clinics for the diagnosis and follow-up of disease. In recent years, AI tools have appeared that help identify the presence of specific conditions within MRI scans, but the technology is not yet widely used in healthcare to support healthspan and longevity improvements. Twinn Health aims to change that, combining MRI and AI to enable the early detection and management of multiple age-related diseases. To learn more, we caught up with founder and CEO Dr Wareed Alenaini.

Epiterna, the Swiss longevity company founded in 2022 by Alejandro Ocampo and Kevin Perez, announced this morning that it has exited stealth and has hit the ground running (with both two legs and four).

Epiterna has a clear ethos: to help people – and their pets – live longer and healthier lives by leveraging its unique high-throughput platform to evaluate drugs and assess their effect on healthy lifespan. Funded by Prima Materia, the investment firm founded by Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Spotify investor Shakil Khan, to the tune of €10 million, Prima Materia’s aim is to help the most ambitious European entrepreneurs find technology solutions to society’s most difficult problems.

Longevity.Technology: Longevity science does not always move swiftly, but by using small molecule drugs that have already been approved for use in people and animals, and which are easier to manufacture, distribute and use than more complex therapies, Epiterna is aiming to translate its discoveries into affordable and accessible solutions that produce longer, healthier and happier lives, both for people and for their companion dogs and cats.

Study of over 700,000 people reveals life expectancy gains associated with healthy lifestyle choices.
Is there such a thing as a longevity mantra? A routine or set of guidelines that can help you extend your lifespan and healthspan – in a nutshell, giving you more life in your years and more years in your life?

A new study involving over 700,000 US veterans reports that people who adopt eight healthy lifestyle habits by middle age can expect to live substantially longer than those with few or none of these habits.

While it’s a list full of the usual suspects, having such a large data set has allowed the research team to put some numbers alongside these pillars of longevity.

The eight habits are:

Being physically active
Being free from opioid addiction
Not smoking
Managing stress
Having a good diet
Not regularly binge drinking
Having good sleep hygiene
Having positive social relationships

Large language models (LLMs) have taken the tech industry by storm, powering experiences that can only be described as magical—from writing a week’s worth of code in seconds to generating conversations that feel even more empathetic than the ones we have with humans. Trained on trillions of tokens of data with clusters of thousands of GPUs, LLMs demonstrate remarkable natural language understanding and have transformed fields like copy and code, propelling us into the new and exciting generative era of AI. As with any emerging technology, generative AI has been met with some criticism. Though some of this criticism does reflect current limits of LLMs’ current capabilities, we see these roadblocks not as fundamental flaws in the technology, but as opportunities for further innovation.

To better understand the near-term technological breakthroughs for LLMs and prepare founders and operators for what’s around the bend, we spoke to some of the leading generative AI researchers who are actively building and training some of the largest and most cutting edge models: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere; Noam Shazeer, CEO of Character.AI; and Yoav Shoham of AI21 Labs. These conversations identified 4 key innovations on the horizon: steering, memory, “arms and legs,” and multimodality. In this piece, we discuss how these key innovations will evolve over the next 6 to 12 months and how founders curious about integrating AI into their own businesses might leverage these new advances.

It’s official – cellular reprogramming is hot. Companies like Altos Labs, Retro Bioscience and NewLimit have already attracted massive funding as they attempt to harness the power of reprogramming to rejuvenate cells, treat disease and potentially reverse the aging process itself. But the science is still far from being fully understood, and it’s doubtful that any company is yet close to finding the solution to translating this powerful technology into human applications.

As a result, new players continue to enter the cellular reprogramming race, including Focal Biosciences, a spin-out from the renowned ETH Zurich. The company is supported by biotech VC fund and company builder Apollo Health Ventures and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland.

Longevity.Technology: Focal Biosciences is building on the work of scientific founder G V Shivashankar, a professor at both PSI and ETH Zurich, and a recognized leader in mechanogenomics and cellular reprogramming. Rather than focusing on transcription factors, the company says its approach to reprogramming leverages aspects of mechanobiology, imaging and machine learning to identify potential small molecule modulators of reprogramming. To learn more, we caught up with Focal Biosciences CSO Dr Xian Zhang, and Apollo Health Ventures partner Jan Adams.

Harvard researcher David Sinclair shared the findings, which were published in the July issue of the medical journal Aging, in a series of Twitter posts this week

A team of scientists from Harvard Medical School has identified a combination of drugs that can reverse the aging process within a week. The study was conducted on mice and involved administering three different drugs: growth hormone, Metformin, and a drug that activates the enzyme AMPK. The treatment resulted in the rejuvenation of aged muscles, liver tissue, and other organs.

Harvard researcher David Sinclair shared the discovery on Twitter and in the medical journal Aging. The findings, published in the July issue, shed light on a significant breakthrough in the field of aging, reported New York Post.

“We’ve previously shown age reversal is possible using gene therapy to turn on embryonic genes,” Sinclair tweeted. His 17-tweet thread explaining the findings gathered more than 1 million views. “Now we show it’s possible with chemical cocktails, a step towards affordable whole-body rejuvenation.”

His bold prediction and the reasoning behind it resurfaced in a YouTube video that has gone viral.

In 2015, futurist Ray Kurzweil made an attention-grabbing prediction: by the year 2030, humans will be able to achieve immortality.

Before you write him off as a crackpot, it’s important to know that Kurzweil is a globally-renowned scientist whose work has been recognized and awarded by many prominent organizations. In 1999, he received the prestigious National Medal of Technology, and in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He created the first machine capable of transforming printed text into speech (to help the blind) and developed a synthesizer capable of perfectly emulating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments.

A month ago, the YouTuber ADAGIO uploaded a video in which he recaps Ray Kurzweil’s main ideas and boldest predictions. Among them was an idea he outlined in 2005: by the year 2030, nanotechnology will allow humans to cure diseases through tiny robots capable of repairing our bodies at the cellular level, ultimately enabling us to achieve immortality. In addition to curing disease and preventing aging, technology will allow us to eat whatever we want without worrying about gaining weight or harming our bodies.

It’s been 13 years in the making, but Dr. David Sinclair and his colleagues have finally answered the question of what drives aging. In a study published Jan. 12 in Cell, Sinclair, a professor of genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School, describes a groundbreaking aging clock that can speed up or reverse the aging of cells.

Scientists studying aging have debated what drives the process of senescence in cells—and primarily focused on mutations in DNA that can, over time, mess up a cell’s normal operations and trigger the process of cell death. But that theory wasn’t supported by the fact that older people’s cells often were not riddled with mutations, and that animals or people harboring a higher burden of mutated cells don’t seem to age prematurely.

Sinclair therefore focused on another part of the genome, called the epigenome. Since all cells have the same DNA blueprint, the epigenome is what makes skin cells turn into skin cells and brain cells into brain cells. It does this by providing different instructions to different cells for which genes to turn on, and which to keep silent. Epigenetics is similar to the instructions dressmakers rely on from patterns to create shirts, pants, or jackets. The starting fabric is the same, but the pattern determines what shape and function the final article of clothing takes. With cells, the epigenetic instructions lead to cells with different physical structures and functions in a process called differentiation.
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Scientists Have Reached a Key Milestone
Time, Alice Park – January 12, 2023

She’s Spent a Decade Fighting to Ban Nuclear Weapons. The Stakes Are Only Getting Higher
BY NAINA BAJEKAL – January 4, 2023

March 2017 was an exhilarating time for Beatrice Fihn. The executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was at the U.N. in New York City for talks with more than 120 countries to negotiate a treaty on banning nuclear weapons. One moment still stands out: Nikki Haley, then U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and a group of diplomats from several NATO countries held a press conference outside the General Assembly to protest the talks.

“It was such a hilarious role reversal,” Fihn tells me when we meet for lunch in New York this fall, referring to all the times nuclear-disarmament activists have been outside the corridors of power. “Now, we were in the driver’s seat.”

Fihn, 40, has been trying to shift these dynamics ever since she took the helm of the Geneva-based ICAN nearly a decade ago. In 2017, the charismatic Swedish lawyer was thrust into the spotlight when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for ICAN’s work to draw attention to the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and its efforts to establish the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Now ratified by 68 countries, mostly in the Global South, the ban treaty entered into force in January 2021—the first international legally binding agreement to ban nuclear weapons and associated activities, from testing to development.

Longevity evangelists are injecting people with experimental gene therapies. There are no guarantees—and no refunds.

This story is partially adapted from Buying Time: Exposing the Quest to Cure Ageing, a six-part series about BioViva and its founder Liz Parrish

Parrish—who often describes her interest in aging medicine as humanitarian—has no medical qualifications. Yet she is unapologetic about her gung-ho attitude to medicine. “I believe I’m on the right side of history,” she says. “The truth is, to treat very serious diseases, we are going to have to take risks. What I would say is: Was anyone hurt? I seriously doubt it.”

If you can convince people that aging is a disease, it’s no surprise that some will clamor for a cure—and pay whatever they can for it. This, if anything, ought to underline exactly why medicine carried out under stringent regulations really is the best choice. “We need to protect patient populations,” says Brenner.

For now, the medical establishment has little to offer those who are diagnosed with age-related diseases such as dementia. And warranted skepticism toward last-ditch efforts to cure them can come off like cynicism. MJ has no regrets about participating in the experiment in Tijuana. “I think somebody has got to go out there and try these things and see if they actually work,” she tells me. “By the time we got home, I really did feel sharper. Now I’m fading, and I can tell I’m fading. I wanna go back for another shot. I’m ready.”

An immortality research startup is raising a sea of ​​funds from the super rich in Silicon Valley, and is funding Nobel prizes and talent in dollars. Why her?

Altos Labs is a biological reprogramming technology company that is attracting large investors like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner.
Silicon Valley’s race for immortality has long since started. I spoke to you long ago of the efforts of many Big Techs to invest in research on the prolongation of human life and health. And it seems that this Altos Labs are a pretty big bet. The company is currently attracting some of the best scientists in the world with big paychecks, promising to give them free rein on their anti-aging research.

Some of these are unorthodox visionaries, others even contested, like Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, eg. He is the biologist of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California which caused a sensation in 2017 when the research began on the creation of a human / swine chimera. To reach the Altos Labs, however, there is also Shinya Yamanaka, Nobel laureate for his research on the reversal of aging in cells. He will be the chairman of the Altos Scientific Advisory Board