Dr Evelyne Bischof talks longevity education, embedding longevity medicine into clinical practice and how to scale healthy longevity so everyone benefits.

Evelyne Bischof is Longevity physician at Human Longevity, Chief associate physician internal medicine at Renji Hospital of Jiaotong University School of Medicine and Associate professor Shanghai University of Medicine. She is a doctor who is deeply passionate about embedding longevity and prevention into clinical practice, and leveraging next-gen medtech and AI for biomedical research and practice and digital health applications.

Longevity.Technology: The goal of compressing morbidity and maximising healthspan is one that needs to be championed by physicians and healthcare systems, but there is a lack of knowledge of longevity science among healthcare professionals with the consequences of aging often accepted rather than tackled or avoided. But a longevity medicine revolution is brewing, and Dr Bischof is a key architect of the coming change. We jumped at the change to sit down with her and discover more about embedding longevity medicine in clinical practice.

Evelyne Bischof on…

At speed and at scale

The clinical part of longevity medicine is really what counts to bring the field further; of course we build up on gerosciences, on AI and computation science, and lots is coming into the field from other disciplines, but longevity medicine is the most multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of medicine. However, the field can only move as fast as clinicians do – so, what the clinician can do right now is to choose the panel of longevity diagnostics, which includes preventative elements, but also advanced measurements. These might still not be fully validated and still in a longitudinal data sense, but can still guide intervention. This will hopefully soon be much more scalable with the help of AI and IT.

Realising the dream

There is a big interest in online learning, but there was a gap in clinicians’ education on longevity as there was no course that we knew of that was customised for physicians, that was speaking in the language of physicians. There were plenty of educational resources for scientists, but clinicians need different languages, so the idea of the longevity medicine course – something that was free and available to everybody – came about. It was my personal dream – and that of Alex Zhavoronkov and many others – to bring a curricula like this into an academic setting in med schools, and NHS UK was the first system to adopt it with others on the way.

Scaling healthy longevity to the clinic and beyond

Sheba Medical Center, which is affiliated with Tel Aviv University, is opening a longevity department, a place where people will come to be diagnosed with all the measurements of longevity. Although I can’t disclose the entire protocol, it’s abundant, and is not commercial – people won’t have to pay for it. There will also be collaborations with biobanks and with research, and high level physicians involved from internal medicine, endocrinology, gynaecology and so on who will be working with the patients and who will also suggest interventions.

We hope to help people reduce their biological age and to bring healthy longevity to Israel and then spread the model to other countries. We hear a lot about scalability of healthy longevity, and I think this is one of the greatest examples.