New Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation aims for scientific and rhetorical value – and to run the debug cycle for longevity research.

The Longevity Investors Conference is quickly turning into one of the highlights in the longevity calendar, and we were delighted to be able to interview some of the speakers in a few ‘backstage’ moments.

Longevity.Technology: Held in the exclusive location of Gstaad in Switzerland, The Longevity Investors Conference (LIC) is the world’s leading and most private longevity-focused investors-only conference. Providing relevant insights into the fast-growing field of longevity, the conference also offers expert education and investment opportunities, as well as fostering excellent networking opportunities.

Dr Aubrey de Grey was in Gstaad to address the conference on rejuvenation biotechnology as well as being part of a panel discussing where crypto meets longevity. We grabbed a few moments with de Grey to find out more about his new foundation, the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, parabiosis and combination therapies – check out what he had to say in our video below.

Aubrey de Grey on…

The importance of LIC

The Longevity Investors Conference is a milestone simply because it’s so high end; the location, the registration fee – these tell you how much the investor community have now bought into the longevity sector.

His new foundation

The new foundation is going to be a progression of the SENS Research Foundation which I co-founded back in 2009, but there are things that are one step beyond – more futuristic and edgier, that what SRF are doing. I am now in a position, especially given the predilections of some of the major donors which have come in from the crypto community over the last couple of years, to go a bit further.

Combining therapies for success

We’ve been developing individual therapies that have some demonstrable benefit, but have always expected we’ll have to put them together to get a big benefit. Now is the time that we can begin to do that. Phase 1 was started at SENS Research Foundation about a year ago, and we’re going to do it in the new foundation at scale. We’ll be doing quite a lot of different combinations of therapies in parallel – and the goal is to reach Robust Mouse Rejuvenation, which is a doubling or more of the lifespan of otherwise-healthy mice, with therapies that we apply only starting when they’re already in middle age.

I believe that, not only will that have great scientific value, but also it will have enormous rhetorical value in dispelling the ability to believe that this will never work for humans.

Taking parabiosis up a notch

I call it “parabiosis on steroids”, but really it’s ex vivo parabiosis, which sounds like a contradiction-in-terms! The idea is to take a single organ and to try to rejuvenate it with perfusate – stuff that we’d pump through the vasculature – to a greater extent that we can do if the organ is still in the body.

As well as future possible organ treatment, there is also a value from a knowledge gathering perspective; it may be the quickest route to understanding what kind of thing we could do in situ – there maybe be a better debug cycle on the experiment.

Check out more of our coverage on Longevity Investors Conference HERE