The Agenda 👇
News bulletin 📰
Longevity-as-a-Service
Recent funding in longevity 💰
Upcoming events 📅
Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
1/ News bulletin 📰
🇬🇧 London-based biotech Genflow inks new research agreement with Magnitude Biosciences - new drive for research and pre-clinical drug discovery
🇪🇸 Spanish researchers determine mitochondrial tweaking in mice leads to improvements in joint health - paper met with optimism for a novel therapeutic target for treating osteoporosis associated with ageing
📔 Large-scale BMJ study of some 350,000 participants shows that exercise and good diet affect mortality independently - both needed both to stay healthy
🧠 Vitamin D supplements in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease may make the cognitive problems worse - disease seems to disrupt Vitamin D processing
🥚 Immature oocytes maintain youth by shutting down a protein complex involved in mitochondrial energy production - complex I is deactivated until it's ready to be used
2/ Longevity-as-a-Service
Longevity initiatives are often centred on the destination, with goals to delay or even defy death. The extension of life expectancy and the ambition of adding years to the healthspan dominate the conversation almost to exclusion of any life itself. This endgame obsession has generated an intrinsic paradox, tying any success in the field of extending healthspans to the nature and time of death. Consider however, if we reframed longevity m journey; that is the series of small daily decisions which compound into a longer, happier, and healthier life.
Deep Longevity, a spinoff of Insilico Medicine, uses a constellation of “ageing clocks” as yardsticks of health and the effectiveness of lifestyle interventions and dietary supplements (see below). These clocks, developed in collaboration with concierge longevity practice Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI), could prove to be central to re-framing longevity research and business models around the journey of life.
As part of this collaboration, Deep Longevity is developing and providing customised predictors of human biological age to clinicians at Health Nucleus, the health wellness clinic located in San Diego. Its clients are among the very first adopters of the technology, and of life-centred longevity care, albeit because the price tag puts the service out of reach for most consumers.
The clinic, with its recurring clients, is building a novel dataset of these participants that comprise a longitudinal series of snapshots of the person’s biological age alongside interventions. The ambition of this service is to not only feedback these clock data to service users, but develop predictive capabilities trained on large dataset of clinical biomarkers, such an individual’s behaviour, appearance, medical history, microbiome, transcriptome, methylation, and heart rate variability.
Early studies show that these clocks can correlate with specific diseases, such as diabetes and sarcopenia, but the qualifying criteria is that what they measure associates with mortality and perhaps also a clinical intervention. Early interventions target lifestyle habits such as diet, sleep, exercise, and supplements, to the extent they prove impactful, but could later include longevity drug therapies and non-pharmaceutical treatments.
Repeat testing with ageing clocks can happen at any given interval deemed appropriate by a longevity physician, creating a recurring demand for delivering longevity care. At a minimum, regulatory-grade ageing clocks could form part of the annual medical check-up, to determine how one’s biological age has changed over the course of the preceding year. This could be particularly important for ageing clocks that prove to be effective at determining disease-specific risk.
If the latter proves to be true, it is also likely that these ageing clocks will more routinely be used as secondary endpoints in clinical trials to help study sponsors understand where an intervention is having an effect, and at levels that might be missed by traditional statistical analysis.
The longevity market is a rapidly evolving space with new ventures experimenting with novel ways to address these challenges. A step change in thinking could unlock more sustainable business models that accelerate the trajectory of clinical research and accessibility of longevity care. Still in its infancy however, longevity has its own meandering journey to chart.
3/ Recent funding in longevity 💰
Insilico Medicine raises $60m Series D and launch AI-powered drug discovery robotics laboratory
Occuity announces new investment round as it eyes up product development
4/ Upcoming events 📅
🇬🇧 The Nutrition and the Biology of Ageing conference is being hosted by the Biochemical Society and the British Society for Research on Ageing, and will feature Brian Kennedy of the National University of Singapore. Conference will take place at University of Kent Canterbury, UK on September 12-14.
🇨🇭 On September 28-30 the Longevity Investors Conference (LIC) are hosting their third annual conference in Gstaad! It will be a great opportunity to learn about diverse longevity investment strategies, network with like-minded leaders, and get acquainted with the recent scientific breakthroughs by the leading longevity experts in 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 🧑💼
Insilico Medicine // Business Development Consultant // Europe, Remote
Fauna Bio // Chief of Staff // Emeryville, CA
Altos Labs // Early in Career Program Manager // San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Relation Therapeutics // Data Engineer // London, UK
Juvena Therapeutics // Senior Research Associate // Palo Alto, CA