Category: Longevity

Just $100bn to cure aging. A conversation with Andrew Steele

Just $100bn to cure aging. A conversation with Andrew Steele

Ageless Andrew Steele is a Briton based in Berlin. At Oxford University he gained a PhD in physics, but then he switched to computational biology, and held positions at Cancer Research UK and the Francis Crick Institute. Along the way, he decided that aging was the single most important scientific challenge of our time. This led him to write the book "Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old". Steele has become one of TV’s favourite science experts, appearing on the "Impossible Engineering" show on the Discovery channel, and the "Strangest Things" show on Sky. He joined the...
What happens when everyone realises we can live much longer? We may find out as soon as 2025. With Aubrey de Grey

What happens when everyone realises we can live much longer? We may find out as soon as 2025. With Aubrey de Grey

Let’s not just cure cancer: let’s cure aging One of the most exciting areas of modern scientific research is the investigation of the causes and cures for aging. Not individual diseases like cancer and heart disease, but the processes which make us elderly and frail, and which thereby make us more susceptible to these diseases. Aubrey de Grey has been at the forefront of anti-aging research for more than 20 years. He founded the Methuselah Foundation in 2003, and the SENS Foundation (Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence) in 2009, Most recently, “Aubrey 3.0” is the LEV Foundation (Longevity Escape Velocity),...
How Insilico Medicine uses AI to accelerate drug development

How Insilico Medicine uses AI to accelerate drug development

Within the longevity research community, Alex Zhavoronkov is well-known for his relentless focus. He works seven days a week and takes no holidays. The hard work is paying off: In February, Insilico Medicine, the AI drug development company he founded, announced the first phase 1 clinical trials for a wholly AI-developed drug. Following a series of investment rounds in the rest of the year, the company is now well-funded, and its software is widely used in the pharma industry. Alex explains the company’s progress in the latest episode of the London Futurist Podcast. Three phases of drug development Drug development...
Regenerating the thymus: profile of Greg Fahy

Regenerating the thymus: profile of Greg Fahy

We heard a great deal about T cells during the Covid pandemic. They are crucial to resisting infection, and they are manufactured in your thymus, a small organ behind your breastbone. Unfortunately, the thymus starts to deteriorate when you are young, which is why the elderly were particularly susceptible to Covid. Greg Fahy was already a successful and noted cryobiologist when he embarked on a series of experiments to regenerate the thymus. He wants to remind our bodies how to be young. Wanting to be President When Greg Fahy was small he wanted to be President. This was simply because...
Extending health spans by extending telomeres: profile of Liz Parrish

Extending health spans by extending telomeres: profile of Liz Parrish

Patient zero Liz Parrish was nervous. She was on a plane to Colombia, where she would undergo an untested gene therapy. She and her colleagues had spent two years developing the therapy and making the preparations, but they could not know how it would work out. It was September 2015, and Parrish had been inspired to take this step because her son, suffering from type 1 diabetes, was unable to obtain treatment for his condition in the USA. She decided to embark upon a mission to persuade the FDA to move from a precautionary approach to a proactive one. It...
Preventing the brain from aging: profile of Jean Hébert

Preventing the brain from aging: profile of Jean Hébert

Machines can be fixed Jean Hébert wanted to be a molecular biologist long before he knew what the term meant. As a boy in elementary school in Montreal, Quebec, he decided that getting old was a bad idea. He reasoned that we are essentially machines, so it must be possible to fix our bodies when they suffer damage, and begin to malfunction. This line of thinking led him all the way to a PhD in genetics, but while doing that he realised that re-engineering the genome to stop aging would be very hard indeed. He decided to change direction, and...
Can the UAE become one of the world’s major centres for longevity research?

Can the UAE become one of the world’s major centres for longevity research?

According to Betteridge’s Law, any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered with a “no”. But let’s not be hasty. A few months ago, the UAE declared a shift in its healthcare policy towards longevity and healthy aging. Throughout its fairly short history, the UAE has been a remarkably ambitious country. Could it become one of the world’s longevity capitals - a global centre for longevity research? Transformations In the 51 years since its creation in 1971, the UAE has gone through a series of remarkable transformations. It has developed from a collection of Bedouin tribes to...
AI and skin biomarkers: profile of Anastasia Georgievskaya

AI and skin biomarkers: profile of Anastasia Georgievskaya

Anastasia Georgievskaya is using AI to develop biomarkers from photos of consumers’ skin. She is doing important work for the longevity revolution, but the consumers are more attracted by offers of improved attractiveness than offers of extended lifespan. Skin biomarkers Anastasia Georgievskaya runs a company in Estonia that provides consumers with recommendations engines for healthcare and lifestyle changes, using indicators from photographs of their skin. The company is called Haut.AI, and it operates a software platform which solicits images, and also lifestyle and preference data from individuals. It processes this information, and provides the results to clients. The clients include...
Using AI to live to 200: profile of Sergey Young

Using AI to live to 200: profile of Sergey Young

Hard work Sergey Young was born in Dalnegorsk, a small and shrinking town in Russia's Far East. It is closer to China and Japan than to the regional capital Vladivostok, and Young describes it as not so much in the middle of nowhere as at the end of nowhere. But he was lucky enough to be born into the age of glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring). It didn't seem lucky at first. His parents were chemical engineers, and he followed in their footsteps by taking an engineering degree in Moscow. He was still only 18 when his mother phoned...
The optimistic investor: profile of Jim Mellon

The optimistic investor: profile of Jim Mellon

The greatest investment opportunity in history Jim Mellon is an optimist. Which is just as well, since he is one of the people trying to engineer a complete transformation in attitudes towards aging – attitudes within the medical profession, among the public at large, and crucially, in the investment community. As an example of his optimism, Mellon says that, thanks largely to the vertiginous advances in artificial intelligence, “if you can stay alive for another ten to twenty years, and if you aren’t yet over 75, and if you remain in reasonable health for your age, you have an excellent...
First wholly AI-developed drug enters Phase 1 Trials

First wholly AI-developed drug enters Phase 1 Trials

For several years we have been hearing about the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve traditional drug discovery and development. In the last two years, clinical trials have begun. The UK’s Exscientia made headlines last April by announcing the start of a Phase 1 clinical trial for a drug it designed using AI for an established protein target. Recursion Pharmaceuticals in Utah uses AI to find new uses for the drugs owned by other companies. Insilico Medicine has now announced the crucial next step: the start of the world’s first Phase 1 clinical trial of a drug developed from...
The role of AI in extending health span

The role of AI in extending health span

“Not proper science” The field of longevity medicine is coming alive. Until the last few years, the project of halting and reversing aging was not seen as “proper science”, and not a fit use for public funds. Aging was seen as an inevitable and permanent part of the human condition. It was not a disease, but a vulnerability to disease which grows over time, and cannot be redressed. People who argued the contrary were viewed by the medical establishment as entertaining mavericks at best, disreputable charlatans at worst. The sneering has not entirely disappeared, but today there is significant investment...
AI in healthcare in 2022

AI in healthcare in 2022

In the tenth anniversary year of the Big Bang in AI we will see better drug discovery processes, better diagnostics, and better understanding of human biology. Tenth anniversary of AI’s Big Bang Next year will see the tenth anniversary of the Big Bang in artificial intelligence (AI). In September 2012, a team led by Geoff Hinton won an annual image recognition competition called ImageNet, using a type of silicon chip called graphics processing units (GPUs) and a type of algorithm called convolutional neural nets (CNNs). Hinton's team was not the first to use these techniques, but the margin of their...
Bridging the gap between scientists and clinicians: profile of Morten Scheibye-Knudsen

Bridging the gap between scientists and clinicians: profile of Morten Scheibye-Knudsen

The longevity "bug" Early in his medical career, Morten Scheibye-Knudsen spent six months working as a physician in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. It is a small town of fewer than 20,000 people, but he was enchanted, and almost didn't return to his native Denmark. We should be grateful that he did listen to the call of anti-aging research, and head back to Copenhagen: he went on to become one of the leading pioneers applying modern artificial intelligence (AI) to the field of longevity medicine. Scheibye-Knudsen caught the longevity "bug" as a teenager, appalled by watching his grandparents grow frail...
AI for optimal health: profile of Evelyne (Eva) Yehudit Bischof

AI for optimal health: profile of Evelyne (Eva) Yehudit Bischof

Workaholics Becoming a workaholic seems to be an occupational hazard among longevity researchers and advocates. A few weeks ago, Eva Bischof was involved in a serious accident, which gave her concussion, and badly injured her arm. Despite being a highly qualified doctor, the therapy she prescribed for herself was not bed rest - but work. You probably have to be a workaholic to secure the qualifications and the professional appointments on Bischof's CV. Especially if you come from humble origins: Bischof is the daughter of a tailor and an accountant's assistant, and she spent her summers in her grandparents' village,...
Putting AI to work in longevity research: profile of Alex Zhavoronkov

Putting AI to work in longevity research: profile of Alex Zhavoronkov

A man on a mission Alex Zhavoronkov is a man on a mission. He is extremely focused - some might say obsessive. He works 18 hours a day 365 days a year. He takes no holidays, and has no plans to start a family - unless he meets a potential partner who is at least as focused as himself. The subject of this relentless attention is the aging process – how to understand it, arrest it, and reverse it. In 2013, Zhavoronkov published a book called “The Ageless Generation” which argued that everyone over about 30 years old is effectively...
Tooling the AI longevity revolution: profile of Michael Antonov

Tooling the AI longevity revolution: profile of Michael Antonov

Michael Antonov caught “the longevity bug” after helping to found Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headgear company, and selling it to Facebook for $2.3bn. He went back to college and taught himself biochemistry, and now he invests in startups which are developing the tools to allow us to understand the fabulously complex mechanics of our bodies. Russian emigres What is it with Russians? If you throw a ball into the audience during a conference on aging there is a pretty good chance it will be caught by a Russian, or someone of Russian extraction. Michael Antonov attributes this partly to...
Using AI to convert sick care into health care

Using AI to convert sick care into health care

An Apple a day… Later this year, the 7th series of the phenomenally successful Apple Watch will be launched. The company has unveiled a new watch every September since 2015, and the cottage industry of Apple followers speculates that the series 7 will feature blood glucose measurement, using a relatively new technology of terahertz electromagnetic radiation. Blood glucose measurement is especially useful for diabetics. Blood alcohol measurement, and better sleep monitoring are also candidates for inclusion this time round. With the Watch, Apple has not simply added another device to its product line-up. CEO Tim Cook has lofty ambitions for...