Biotech & Health Extension: Program
Foresight’s Biotech & Health Extension Group sponsored by 100 Plus Capital is a private group of scientists, entrepreneurs, and institutional allies, connected by a virtual group, who meet monthly to spur field-wide progress on technologies that fight aging and increase human healthspan. Meetings are private and may be off-the-record. Those that are recorded can be found on our video page.
In 2021 we focus on a year-long ecosystem accelerator to support high-impact work on health extension that would not otherwise get done. In the first half of 2021, we identify crucial areas in the health extension field that have strong multiplier effects for advancing progress. In the second half, we support promising approaches for solving those key areas via financial support, mentorship, and connection to relevant researchers, founders, and funders. See the keynote program below with mentors toward the bottom of this page. Apply to join with your idea, project, or company. You can also support to join.
January | Meet Group Members & Define Goals
As Foresight’s president, Allison oversees the public programs such as the fellowship, and private programs, such as the strategy groups on biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer science. She shares result of Foresight’s work with the public, for instance at the Wall Street Journal, SXSW, The O’Reilly AI Conference, The World Economic Forum, The Partnership on AI, Effective Altruism Global, TEDx and other conferences. She created existentialhope.com, co-edited the book Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy with Roman Yampolskyi, and is currently collaborating on a book on Intelligent Voluntary Cooperation with Christine Peterson, and Mark S. Miller. She holds an MS in Philosophy & Public Policy from the London School of Economics, focusing on an NLP-based ethical framework for AGI, and a BA in Philosophy, Politics, Economics from York University.
Sonia Arrison is a best-selling author, analyst, entrepreneur, and investor. She is founder of 100 Plus Capital, co-founder of Unsugarcoat Media (acquired by Medium), and associate founder and advisor to Singularity University in Mountain View, California. Her research focuses on exponentially growing technologies and their impact on society. Her most recent book, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, addresses the social, economic, and cultural impacts of radical human longevity. It gained national best-seller status and keeps Sonia busy speaking all over the world. Sonia is a Board Member at the Thiel Foundation, Foresight Institute, and Woodland School. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia, and author of two previous books (Western Visions and Digital Dialog). She was previously a Director and Senior Fellow in Tech Studies at the Pacific Research Institute and a columnist at TechNewsWorld.
February | Industry blindspots: What work is not incentivized that could dramatically advance progress on aging?
Sonia Arrison is a best-selling author, analyst, entrepreneur, and investor. She is founder of 100 Plus Capital, co-founder of Unsugarcoat Media (acquired by Medium), and associate founder and advisor to Singularity University in Mountain View, California. Her research focuses on exponentially growing technologies and their impact on society. Her most recent book, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, addresses the social, economic, and cultural impacts of radical human longevity. It gained national best-seller status and keeps Sonia busy speaking all over the world. Sonia is a Board Member at the Thiel Foundation, Foresight Institute, and Woodland School. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia, and author of two previous books (Western Visions and Digital Dialog). She was previously a Director and Senior Fellow in Tech Studies at the Pacific Research Institute and a columnist at TechNewsWorld.
Karl Pfleger, PhD (Stanford CS, Machine Learning) now focuses on aging & longevity after a successful tech career (mySimon, Google). A long-time donor to the Buck Institute and SENS Foundation, he is also an angel investor who has backed over 15 aging-related startups. He is the creator of AgingBiotech.info, a free public resource to track the commercialization progress of the aging biotech sector and related information.>
Michael D. West, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of AgeX Therapeutics, Inc, which is focused on the development and commercialization of novel therapeutics targeting human aging. He received his Ph.D. from Baylor College of Medicine in 1989 concentrating on the biology of cellular ageing. He has focused his academic and business career on the application of developmental biology to age-related degenerative disease. He was the founder and first CEO of Geron Corporation (Nasdaq: GERN), and from 1992 to 1998, he held various positions, including CEO, Director, and Vice President. From 1998 to 2007, Dr West held positions as CEO, President, and Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (ACT), which was eventually acquired by Astellas Pharma, Inc. From 2007 to 2018, he was CEO/Co-CEO of BioTime, Inc. (NYSE American: BTX).
Focus: Tissue Rejuvenation via Plasma Dilution
A key direction of my laboratory is to understand age-imposed and pathological changes in molecular compositions of systemic and local environments of adult stem cells and to calibrate these to health – youth. In the past few years this direction has been ramified into synthetic biology, CRISPR technologies, bio-orthogonal proteomics and development of innovative digital bio-sensors that we collaboratively applied to the fields of aging and diagnostics of genetic diseases. Success in this research will improve our understanding of the determinants of homeostatic health and will enable novel rational approaches to treat a number of degenerative, fibrotic, metabolic and inflammatory diseases, as a class.
March | Research perspective: What work is not incentivized that could dramatically advance progress on aging?
Dr. Kennedy earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is well known for his work during his graduate studies with Leonard Guarente, PhD, which led to the discovery that sirtuins (SIR2) modulate aging. He performed postdoctoral studies at the MGH Cancer Center associated with Harvard Medical School. From 2001 to 2010, he held a faculty position at the University of Washington. He was the president and CEO of the Buck Institute from 2010 to 2016 and remains a professor at the Institute. In addition, he is a visiting professor in medicine and healthy aging at National University Singapore, an adjunct professor in the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, and an affiliate professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington. Dr. Kennedy has published more than 160 papers in prestigious journals, including Cell, Science, and Nature. He serves as co-editor-in-chief of Aging Cell and is on the editorial board of a number of other scientific journals. He also routinely provides lectures to the public and is active in writing opinion pieces on aging in public media outlets around the world. More recently, Dr. Kennedy has become active in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical arena, serving as a consultant for several companies. He is currently on the board of directors of three companies, including acting as board chair of Mt. Tam Pharmaceuticals. He has also completed research projects for several biotechnology companies.
Joris Deelen is leading the research group on Genetics and Biomarkers of Human Aeging at the Max Planck Institute for Aeging Research. The group studies the genetic mechanisms underlying healthy ageing in humans by investigating the effect of genetic variants that are unique to long-lived families on the functioning of pathways implicated in ageing and/or age-related diseases. Moreover, they try to identify and validate biomarkers of healthy ageing using data from large-scale international collaborations of human studies.
Lynne Cox is the George Moody Fellow and Tutor in Biochemistry at Oriel at the University of Oxford. Her lab studies the molecular basis of human ageing, with the aim of reducing the morbidity and frailty associated with old age.Her lab studies progeroid Werner’s syndrome (WS), where cell senescence and early onset of many age-related symptoms in the patients result from loss of a single protein, the WRN helicase/exonuclease that is involved in DNA replication, recombination and repair. The lab has shown that DNA replication is aberrant in human cells when WRN protein is mutated. Her research interests lie in DNA, how it is copied accurately and how this is co-ordinated within the cell division cycle.
Focus: Brain Cell Replacement as the Cornerstone to Beating Aging
Jean Hebert is Professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience, and Professor in the Department of Genetics. His research is focused on devising methods of cell replacement for the adult neocortex when its cells are lost due to damage or age-related degeneration.
March | Focus area: Clinical trials & senolytics Q&A
James L. Kirkland, M.D., Ph.D., is Director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging at Mayo Clinic and Noaber Foundation Professor of Aging Research. Dr. Kirkland’s research is on the contribution of fundamental aging processes, particularly cellular senescence, to age-related diseases and development of agents and strategies for targeting fundamental aging mechanisms to treat age-related chronic diseases and disabilities. Additional research areas include molecular and physiological mechanisms of age-related adipose tissue and metabolic dysfunction, frailty, and loss of resilience to acute diseases in old age. Dr. Kirkland’s laboratory published the first article about agents that clear senescent cells – senolytic drugs. Dr. Kirkland demonstrated that senolytic agents enhance healthspan and delay, prevent, or alleviate multipleage-related disorders and chronic diseases in mouse models. He published the first clinical trials of senolytic drugs and is currently conducting multiple clinical trials of senolytics. He has more than 200 publications and holds over 20 patents. Dr. Kirkland is Principal Investigator of the Translational Geroscience Network (R33 AG061456), which brings together 8 academic institutions to translate healthspan interventions, including senolytics and other drugs that target fundamental aging processes, from bench to bedside. He is a scientific advisory board member for several companies and academic organizations. He is President-Elect of the American Federation for Aging Research, a past member of the National Advisory Council on Aging of the National Institutes of Health, past chair of the Biological Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America, and a member of the Clinical Trials Advisory Panel of the National Institute on Aging. He is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine, geriatrics, and endocrinology and metabolism. Dr. Kirkland is the 2020 recipient of the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction from the American Federation for Aging Research.
April | Institutional perspective: What work could dramatically advance progress on aging from an NIA perspective?
Ronald Kohanski, PhD. is the Acting Director of the Division of Aging Biology at the National Institute on Aging, NIH. Trained as a biochemist, he obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Chicago in 1981. After a postdoctoral fellowship with M. Daniel Lane at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, he held a faculty position at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine for 17 years before returning as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins. His fields of research included enzymology and developmental biology of the insulin receptor. Dr. Kohanski joined the Division of Aging Biology, NIA in 2005 as a Program Officer, and became Division Deputy Director in 2007. Dr. Kohanski has promoted aging research in the specific areas of stem cell biology and cardiovascular biology. More broadly he promotes research efforts to expand studies beyond laboratory animals, to address the basic biology of aging explicitly in human populations and non-laboratory animals (domestic and wild populations).
April | How to Fund and Build Geroprotectors
James Peyer is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Cambrian Biopharma. He also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Sensei Biotherapeutics and board and executive roles across Cambrian’s pipeline. He has spent his entire life dedicated to the mission of finding ways of preventing people from getting diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s instead of waiting for people to get sick. James was previously Founder and Managing Partner at Apollo Ventures, the first global longevity-focused venture capital firm, investing across the US and Europe. Prior to Apollo, James was a biotech R&D specialist at the New York office of McKinsey & Company, serving major pharmaceutical clients. He earned his PhD in stem cell biology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as a National Science Foundation Fellow and received his B.A. with special honors from the University of Chicago.
April | Focus area: Biomarker development for FDA-recognized diseases
May | Focus area: Platforms, tools, data analysis for long-term progress on aging research
Daniel is the 2020 Foresight Fellow in Health & Longevity and the tenure-track assistant professor at the Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational Medicine & the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg. His background is in structural biology, strengthened by a B.Sc. in biochemistry (University of Tuebingen, Germany, 2014) and a M.Sc. in biophysics (ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2016) with distinction, enabled him to understand biological processes down to the atomic level. During his doctoral work with Dr. Martin Fussenegger at ETH Zurich, Daniel employed these fundamental insights to genetically re-engineer human cells for therapeutic purposes. Creatively using the principles of synthetic biology, he designed new proteins with a dedicated function – such as a novel caffeine receptor – and used these intricate tools to develop potent new cell-based therapies for diabetes mellitus and Parkinson’s disease. Further, Daniel was distinguished by several prestigious fellowships, such as the Excellence Scholarship and Opportunity Program of ETH Zurich and by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, as well as in the form of a Selected Young Scientist at the 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, an honor extended to the 600 most promising biomedical scientists worldwide. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. James J. Collins at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Daniel harnessed the potency of cutting edge machine learning techniques to elucidate the biological functions of glycans since September 2019. Daniel was the first researcher to devise, develop, and apply methods derived from artificial intelligence to glycans and begin to tame their astounding complexity. In 2020, Daniel, was selected to be part of the prestigious Branco Weiss Fellowship – Society in Science 2020 Fellows, and as such was awarded $106,000 annually for five years to work on connecting machine learning and glycobiology, towards unveiling the inner workings of biology and facilitating biomedical therapies of tomorrow.
Felix received a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in physics at Linköping University in Sweden, followed by a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Basel. His master’s thesis, which was later published in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, was one of the first works that demonstrated successful learning of crystal formation energies. Felix developed machine learning techniques for modeling fundamental quantum mechanical properties. Such properties include energies, forces, and dipole moments of crystals and molecules. In one of his first Ph.D. projects, which was published in Physical Review Letters, Felix used a machine learning model to predict formation energies of almost 2 million Elpasolite crystal structures. This model was also used to identify around 90 potentially thermodynamically stable structures. He was also among those who pioneered the use of quantum mechanical operators directly on machine learning models, which results in improved performance and is a stepping stone towards universal machine learning modeling of quantum mechanical properties. Additionally, Felix dedicated parts of his Ph.D. to benchmarking and comparing the performance of different machine learning models. In one such example Felix and his team, in collaboration with scientists from google, performed one of the most comprehensive comparisons of different machine learning models to date. Felix envisions a research framework where these techniques could be harnessed to understand and model biological and materials systems of varying complexity. Such fundamental models could be used to develop therapeutics, as well as new materials tailored for exhibiting specific properties. To those ends, Felix recently started a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where applying the models that he developed during his Ph.D. to discover new drugs and materials.
May | Focus area: Thymus Rejuvenation Progress Update
Designed and led the TRIIM trial; Published the first report of thymus regeneration in a normal human; Granted patents on methods for and applications of human thymus regeneration
Fellow of the American Aging Association (since 2005), Former Director of the American Aging Association (16 years)
Editor-in-Chief, The Future of Aging: Pathways to Human Life Extension
Awarded the Society for Cryobiology’s Luyet Medal in 2016
In 2009, showed indefinite survival of rabbit kidney transplanted after cooling to -130° Celsius; Led 21CM team as co-winner of Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize, 2018 winner of Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize
June | Focus area: Biomarker and aging clock development needed to spur progress on aging
Vadim N. Gladyshev is a professor at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an expert and pioneer in antioxidant/redox biology. He is known for his characterization of the human selenoprotein encoded by 25 genes.He has conducted studies on whether organisms can acquire cellular damage from their food; the role selenium plays as a micro-nutrient with significant health benefits. In 2013 he won the NIH Pioneer Award.
Dr. Gordan Lauc is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry. His laboratory performed the first large scale studies of the human plasma glycome (in 2009) and human IgG glycome (in 2011), which were the basis for the subsequent first GWAS of the human plasma and IgG glycomes. He was invited to lecture at numerous international conferences (including FEBS, EMBO, ASBMB, Glyco, etc), elected for visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University, University of Edinburgh and Edith Cowan University in Perth. In 2011 he was inducted in the prestigious Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. In 2007 Prof Lauc established Genos Ltd, a private research organisation accredited by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sport that currently has 28 employees, including 17 researchers. Genos was ranked as #1 in the 2013 survey of The Scientist magazine for “The best place to work for researches” in the category “Industry” and received a Charter of the Republic of Croatia (awarded by the President of Croatia) for an outstanding economic contribution to development of Croatia by commercialization of research results in 2014.
Kristen leads BIOAGE in its mission to develop a broad pipeline of therapies that target aging in order to increase healthspan and address chronic diseases. Kristen draws from a deep background in aging research and systems biology to develop BIOAGE’s data-driven approach to identify and target the molecular pathways that drive aging. Kristen received her PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University where she was a fellow of the Ellison Medical Foundation / American Federation for Aging Research. She has over 10 years of experience developing novel bioinformatics approaches for data-driven investigation into the mechanisms of aging and age-related disease, with 18 published papers spanning computational drug discovery, biomarkers of aging, and the genetics of exceptional human longevity.
Dr. Horvath is an aging researcher and bioinformatician whose research ranges from epidemiology, chronic diseases, epigenetics, to systems biology. He developed systemic biologic approaches such as weighted gene co-expression network analysis. He works on all aspects of biomarker development with a particular focus on genomic biomarkers of aging. He developed a highly accurate multi-tissue biomarker of aging known as the epigenetic clock. Salient features of the epigenetic clock include its high accuracy and its applicability to a broad spectrum of tissues and cell types. He develops and applies methods for analyzing and integrating gene expression-, DNA methylation-, microRNA, genetic marker-, and complex phenotype data. His lab members apply and develop data mining methods to study a broad spectrum of diseases, e.g. aging research, cancer, cardiovascular disease, HIV, Huntington’s disease, neurodegenerative diseases.
July | Metrics for success: Biomarker standardization for long-term progress on aging
Morgan Levine is a ladder-rank Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the Yale School of Medicine and a member of both the Yale Combined Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Yale Center for Research on Aging. Her work relies on an interdisciplinary approach, integrating theories and methods from statistical genetics, computational biology, and mathematical demography to develop biomarkers of aging for humans and animal models using high-dimensional omics data. As PI or co-Investigator on multiple NIH-, Foundation-, and University-funded projects, she has extensive experience using systems-level and machine learning approaches to track epigenetic, transcriptomic, and proteomic changes with aging and incorporate this information to develop measures of risk stratification for major chronic diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Her work also involves development of systems-level outcome measures of aging, aimed at facilitating evaluation for geroprotective interventions. A number of the existing biological aging measures she has developed are being applied in both basic and observational research.
Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and multiomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor (TF) binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks. Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated (e.g. lncRNAs and TF binding sites), and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He launched the field of personalized medicine by combining different state-of–the-art “omics” technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of a person, and his laboratory pioneered the use of wearables technologies (smart watches and continuous glucose monitoring) for precision health. He is a cofounder of many biotechnology companies, including Personalis, SensOmics, Qbio, January, Protos, Oralome, Mirvie and Filtricine.
Jamie Justice is an asistant professor in gerontology and geriatric medicine at the Wake Forrest School of Medicine. She is a translational scientist conducting aging research, from basic biology of aging to clinical trials aimed at improving physical function and extending healthy lifespan (“healthspan”). She has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses, completed extensive training in biostatistics, managed several comparative aging studies and serve as PI and Co-I for clinical trials in older adults using repurposed pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, diet and lifestyle interventions.
August | Focus area: Regenerative Medicine
Distinguished Professor in the Biology department and Vannevar Bush Chair, serves as director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Recent honors include the Scientist of Vision award and the Distinguished Scholar Award. His group’s focus is on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex pattern regulation, and harnessing endogenous bioelectric dynamics toward rational control of growth and form.
TAME Q&A: Lessons for progress on aging
Nir Barzilai, MD, is a Professor in the Department of Endocrinology Medicine and the Department of Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair of Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Dr. Barzilai is the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Director of the Nathan Shock Center for Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the center is coordinating 80 investigators and six program projects on the biology of aging. He is also the director of the Glenn Center of Excellence in the Biology of Human Aging. He is a chaired professor of medicine and of genetics and a member of the Diabetes Research Center and the divisions of endocrinology and geriatrics.
Sept- Nov | Health Extension: Radical Progress Accelerator
Projects that seek to make foundational progress on health extension receive mentorship and financial grants to create a prototype that is presented for potential follow-on support. Our keynotes from Jan – Aug serve as an orientation for the level of ambition and potential focus areas your project could address. Rather than predictable incremental advances, your idea, if successful, would significantly advance field-wide progress on health extension. Final projects are presented to the main group and invited funders for follow-up support.
Mentors
Dr. Horvath is an aging researcher and bioinformatician whose research ranges from epidemiology, chronic diseases, epigenetics, to systems biology. He developed systemic biologic approaches such as weighted gene co-expression network analysis. He works on all aspects of biomarker development with a particular focus on genomic biomarkers of aging. He developed a highly accurate multi-tissue biomarker of aging known as the epigenetic clock. Salient features of the epigenetic clock include its high accuracy and its applicability to a broad spectrum of tissues and cell types. He develops and applies methods for analyzing and integrating gene expression-, DNA methylation-, microRNA, genetic marker-, and complex phenotype data. His lab members apply and develop data mining methods to study a broad spectrum of diseases, e.g. aging research, cancer, cardiovascular disease, HIV, Huntington’s disease, neurodegenerative diseases.
Nils is a serial entrepreneur and company builder with a long-standing passion for health and biomedicine. At Apollo, Nils brings deal making skills, his impeccable business sense, and his expertise in growing early stage startups.
Nils founded company builder and investor TruVenturo in 2010, and he has taken part in over 30 financing rounds as an investor or co-founder among the companies he has cofounded. Of these, three have attained valuations over $100M, having attracted capital from top venture capital companies such as Insight Venture Partners, Highland Capital, and Harbourvest. Nils sits on the boards of multiple companies in his portfolio, helping to push them rapidly towards inflection points by focusing his teams towards only those activities that generate shareholder value. Nils has studied business in Hamburg and at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) in California. He also completed the EO Entrepreneurial Master’s Program at MIT.
Dr. de Grey is the biomedical gerontologist who devised the SENS platform, and established SENS Research Foundation to implement it. He received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. Dr. de Grey is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.
Andrew J. Scott is Professor of Economics at London Business School having previously held positions at Oxford University, London School of Economics and Harvard University. His work focuses on the economics of longevity and he is the co-author of “The 100 Year Life” and “The New Long Life”. He was Managing Editor for the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal and Non-Executive Director for the UK’s Financial Services Authority 2009-2013. He is currently on the advisory board of the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, the Cabinet Office Honours Committee (Science and Technology), co-founder of The Longevity Forum, a member of the WEF council on Healthy Ageing and Longevity and a consulting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity. Andrew is also the recipient of an ESRC grant for researching the economic longevity dividend.
Jim has advised, invested in, and nurtured more than seventy science and technology companies. While running the Thiel Foundation, he co-founded the Thiel Fellowship and helped create deep science fund Breakout Labs. Thiel Fellows have created more than $90 billion in equity value by founding companies including Freenome, Luminar, Figma, Upstart, OYO, Ethereum, Workflow, Fossa, and the Longevity Fund. Before moving to California, Jim helped lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the principal associate deputy secretary. His responsibilities included overseeing policy and regulations at NIH, FDA, and CDC and he led two major reforms of FDA. He also supported the creation of the Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine, served on the steering committee of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and represented the United States on the U.S. delegation to the World Health Assembly.
Reason is co-founder and CEO of Repair Biotechnologies. He is the founder and writer of Fight Aging!, a leading news website in the biotech community. Reason is also an active angel investor in the space. Previously, Reason was principal software engineer at technology startups. Reason has Masters degrees in Space Physics and Astrophysics.
Joe was the CTO and Co-founder of Vium and the primary technical founder of hardware/software startup OQO which entered the Guinness Book of World Records for building the smallest full-featured PC. His experience spans from biotech research to electronics design. Very experienced in invention, prosecution and monetization of intellectual property, he has over 80 Patents granted and pending in fields ranging from biophysics and safety systems to antennas, thermal systems, user interfaces and analog electronics. He has written numerous peer-reviewed publications in fields such as biophysics, genetics, electronics and robotics. Joe holds a Harvard A.B., MIT S.M. and Caltech research fellowship.
Tina is an ecosystem architect and works with organisations in both private and public sectors to accelerate innovation and transform health with sustainable impact at scale.
Morgan Levine is a ladder-rank Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the Yale School of Medicine and a member of both the Yale Combined Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Yale Center for Research on Aging. Her work relies on an interdisciplinary approach, integrating theories and methods from statistical genetics, computational biology, and mathematical demography to develop biomarkers of aging for humans and animal models using high-dimensional omics data. As PI or co-Investigator on multiple NIH-, Foundation-, and University-funded projects, she has extensive experience using systems-level and machine learning approaches to track epigenetic, transcriptomic, and proteomic changes with aging and incorporate this information to develop measures of risk stratification for major chronic diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Her work also involves development of systems-level outcome measures of aging, aimed at facilitating evaluation for geroprotective interventions. A number of the existing biological aging measures she has developed are being applied in both basic and observational research.
Dr. Gordan Lauc is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry. His laboratory performed the first large scale studies of the human plasma glycome (in 2009) and human IgG glycome (in 2011), which were the basis for the subsequent first GWAS of the human plasma and IgG glycomes. He was invited to lecture at numerous international conferences (including FEBS, EMBO, ASBMB, Glyco, etc), elected for visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University, University of Edinburgh and Edith Cowan University in Perth. In 2011 he was inducted in the prestigious Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. In 2007 Prof Lauc established Genos Ltd, a private research organisation accredited by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sport that currently has 28 employees, including 17 researchers. Genos was ranked as #1 in the 2013 survey of The Scientist magazine for “The best place to work for researches” in the category “Industry” and received a Charter of the Republic of Croatia (awarded by the President of Croatia) for an outstanding economic contribution to development of Croatia by commercialization of research results in 2014.
Daniel is the 202 Foresight Fellow in Health & Longevity. His background is in structural biology, strengthened by a B.Sc. in biochemistry (University of Tuebingen, Germany, 2014) and a M.Sc. in biophysics (ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2016) with distinction, enabled him to understand biological processes down to the atomic level. During his doctoral work with Dr. Martin Fussenegger at ETH Zurich, Daniel employed these fundamental insights to genetically re-engineer human cells for therapeutic purposes. Creatively using the principles of synthetic biology, he designed new proteins with a dedicated function – such as a novel caffeine receptor – and used these intricate tools to develop potent new cell-based therapies for diabetes mellitus and Parkinson’s disease. Further, Daniel was distinguished by several prestigious fellowships, such as the Excellence Scholarship and Opportunity Program of ETH Zurich and by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, as well as in the form of a Selected Young Scientist at the 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, an honor extended to the 600 most promising biomedical scientists worldwide. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. James J. Collins at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Daniel harnesses the potency of cutting edge machine learning techniques to elucidate the biological functions of glycans since September 2019. Daniel was the first researcher to devise, develop, and apply methods derived from artificial intelligence to glycans and begin to tame their astounding complexity. In 2020, Daniel, was selected to be part of the prestigious Branco Weiss Fellowship – Society in Science 2020 Fellows, and as such was awarded $106,000 annually for five years to work on connecting machine learning and glycobiology, towards unveiling the inner workings of biology and facilitating biomedical therapies of tomorrow.
Joris Deelen is leading the research group on Genetics and Biomarkers of Human Aeging at the Max Planck Institute for Aeging Research. The group studies the genetic mechanisms underlying healthy ageing in humans by investigating the effect of genetic variants that are unique to long-lived families on the functioning of pathways implicated in ageing and/or age-related diseases. Moreover, they try to identify and validate biomarkers of healthy ageing using data from large-scale international collaborations of human studies.
Kristen leads BIOAGE in its mission to develop a broad pipeline of therapies that target aging in order to increase healthspan and address chronic diseases. Kristen draws from a deep background in aging research and systems biology to develop BIOAGE’s data-driven approach to identify and target the molecular pathways that drive aging. Kristen received her PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University where she was a fellow of the Ellison Medical Foundation / American Federation for Aging Research. She has over 10 years of experience developing novel bioinformatics approaches for data-driven investigation into the mechanisms of aging and age-related disease, with 18 published papers spanning computational drug discovery, biomarkers of aging, and the genetics of exceptional human longevity.
Felix received a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in physics at Linköping University in Sweden, followed by a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Basel. His master’s thesis, which was later published in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, was one of the first works that demonstrated successful learning of crystal formation energies. Felix developed machine learning techniques for modeling fundamental quantum mechanical properties. Such properties include energies, forces, and dipole moments of crystals and molecules. In one of his first Ph.D. projects, which was published in Physical Review Letters, Felix used a machine learning model to predict formation energies of almost 2 million Elpasolite crystal structures. This model was also used to identify around 90 potentially thermodynamically stable structures. He was also among those who pioneered the use of quantum mechanical operators directly on machine learning models, which results in improved performance and is a stepping stone towards universal machine learning modeling of quantum mechanical properties. Additionally, Felix dedicated parts of his Ph.D. to benchmarking and comparing the performance of different machine learning models. In one such example Felix and his team, in collaboration with scientists from google, performed one of the most comprehensive comparisons of different machine learning models to date. Felix envisions a research framework where these techniques could be harnessed to understand and model biological and materials systems of varying complexity. Such fundamental models could be used to develop therapeutics, as well as new materials tailored for exhibiting specific properties. To those ends, Felix recently started a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where applying the models that he developed during his Ph.D. to discover new drugs and materials.
Margaretta is Managing Editor at Longevity Technology. Longevity Technology is the world’s premier source for news and insights on research, investments, and technologies focused on extending healthy Longevity.
Margaretta is Co-founder & CEO of Jthereum. Jthereum is an Enterprise Blockchain technology company that transforms Java Developers into Blockchain Developers. With Jthereum, Java developers can use their existing Java programming skills to write smart contracts for the Ethereum platform.
Margaretta is President of U1 Technologies. U1 Technologies is an enterprise software company that provides the communications infrastructure for stock trading platforms used by some of the world’s top multinational investment banks. U1’s software is used at the core of large-scale stock trading applications to trade derivatives, bonds, foreign exchange, futures, options and swaps. U1 is privately held and has been profitable since 1999.
Petr Sramek is Managing Partner of Longevitytech.fund and co-founder of LongevityForum.eu. He is a serial entrepreneur in deep tech for more than 30 years. Petr is building science, funding and business infrastructure to support faster adoption of health-span improving technologies. Petr was Entrepreneur in Residence at Singularity University, co-founder of the Platform on Artificial Intelligence at the Confederation of Industry, AI Startup Incubator founder and a Senator for the Czech Republic in the World Business Angels Investment Forum (WBAF). Petr is also the founder of the AI Awards project. Petr has been featured in the group of 28 AI leaders in the flagship World Intellectual Property Organization study.
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