The Agenda 👇
News bulletin 📰
Is age just a number?
Recent funding in longevity 💰
Upcoming events 📅
Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
1/ News bulletin 📰
🎈 VitaDAO Celebrates 1 Year of Funding Longevity Projects - having funded more than 10 projects with ticket sizes between $50K and $1M
🧬 GeroScience publishes study results showing that it is possible to significantly increase lifespan by overexpressing genes - although so far only in yeast
👩 Tina Woods appointed as Healthy Longevity Champion by UK National Innovation Centre for Ageing (NICA) - to accelerate ageing intelligence and further secure UK Research and Innovation’s strategic aims
🫘 COSMOS (COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study) results published - cocoa extract does not affect the prevalence of adverse cardiovascular events but does decrease mortality risk
🐁 Science publishes study showing old human skin rejuvenated when implanted in young mice - researchers posit this was triggered by vascular growth
2/ Is age just a number?
The typical answer to a question about your age is based on the year you were born. A discrete variable that updates once a year, usually with much fanfare. However, people age at different rates, and in so far as evaluating the condition of your body, chronological age is not particularly useful. There are people in their 90s unable to independently mobilise, and centenarians who finish marathons (Fauna Singh was 102 when he completed the Hong Kong Marathon). Chronological age is of diminishing value as a health biomarker as people grow older, because the variation of health across age bands widens with each passing decade.
Biological age is supposed to offer a more personalised measure of an individual’s true physical state. Rather than simply measure the passage of time, biological age quantifies the ageing of the body’s organs and functions. Many scientists and longevity advocates believe this information can not only help with the understanding of ageing processes but can enable novel techniques to change it.
The challenge facing longevity scientists is that biological age is actually quite difficult to measure. There are several tissues and molecular processes involved and they don’t age at the same rate or in the exact same way.
Several methods exist today that try to estimate one’s biological age. Telomeres, which are the protective structures at the ends of chromosomes, shorten every time a chromosome replicates. Measuring the length of telomeres therefore indicates the number of times your genome has replicated and therefore has been used as an approximate yardstick for biological ageing. Other approaches use blood samples to measure the biomarker concentrations that correlate with functional decline. There is even an approach that claims to determine mortality risk by scanning people’s eyes.
Dr Steve Horvath, the UCLA professor who pioneered the first “clock” to indicate human ageing by examining chemical changes to DNA, characterises biological age as a better predictor of morbidity risk than traditional biomarkers.
Horvath’s approach, called the “epigenetic clock”, is widely considered to be the gold standard of measuring biological age. Epigenetics is the study of how your environment changes the way your genes are expressed. Horvath’s clock analyses certain chemical changes to genetic material, a process called DNA methylation which prevents certain genes from being expressed. In 2011, Horvath published his work showing that patterns of DNA methylation could be used to accurately estimate human age.
The key tenet of the research was that as we age, certain parts of the DNA gain methylation and other parts lose methylation, across millions of locations across the genome.
Horvath’s clock tracks several hundreds of these locations, and results in a formula that is able to estimate age across a human’s entire life course, from infant to old age.
Since this seminal piece of work, Horvath and team have developed more sophisticated clocks, that incorporate data collected from the blood samples of the same cohort of subjects over many decades. That data helps the clocks to identify unhealthy ageing with greater precision, and eventually aims to be able to predict the precise time of death. Perhaps fittingly then, Horvath named his second-generation clock: GrimAge.
The publication of these methods have led to an explosion of startups aiming to bring this technology to the mass consumer market. These biological age tests are marketed as premium wellness products, often with minimalist websites, sleek packaging, and influencer endorsements on social media.
Elysium’s $499 saliva test uses technology based on an epigenetic biological clock developed by Dr Morgan Levine, Horvath’s former postdoc. Similarly MyDNAge charges $299 for a blood or urine test that uses a licensed version of Horvath’s clock.
There are popular but less expensive options that don’t use Horvath’s epigenetic clocks, such as Thorne’s biological age test, which costs $95 and a trip to a third-party lab to give a blood sample.
None of these tests have been approved by the FDA, EMA or MHRA.
Currently these clocks are not particularly useful for consumers, as there is very little anyone can do with the result. You might as well hand your doctor the contents of a fortune cookie, because all that is currently available clinically is conventional health advice.
The ultimate goal is that the biological age tests will become reliable enough such that future doctors will be able to make specific recommendations based on them. For now, however, they are but another number.
3/ Recent funding in longevity 💰
4/ Upcoming events 📅
🇩🇪 The Rejuvenation Startup Summit returns this year in Berlin, Germany on October 14-15. This is a vibrant networking event that brings together startups and members of the longevity venture capital/investor ecosystem, all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan.
🇺🇸 The Longevity Summit will be hosting their second annual event in Novato, CA on December 7-8th. The event will unite top longevity entrepreneurs, pharma and biotech companies, longevity investors, researchers, and government organisations from around the world.
🇧🇪 The Eurosymposium on Health Ageing is a unique biennial meeting of scientists working on the biology of ageing, and their next meeting is in Belgium, November 24-26th.
5/ Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
Rejuvenate Bio // Research Associate // San Diego, CA
Altos Labs // US general interest - UK general interest // US - UK
Relation Therapeutics // Senior Scientist II // London, UK
Juvena Therapeutics // Head of Operations // Palo Alto, CA
Insilico Medicine // Vice President of Clinical Research // US-based - remote