Phil Newman reveals longevity’s explosive potential at this year’s Longevity Summit Dublin.
This year’s Longevity Summit Dublin took place on the 17th to the 20th of August and brought together a remarkable lineup of over 40 pioneering scientists, researchers and executives, as well as high net-worth investors.
All of the attendees shared a common focus on addressing the challenges posed by chronic diseases and using evidence-based approaches and pragmatic solutions to promote healthier and longer lives. By fostering an environment of collaboration and knowledge dissemination, this event plays a pivotal role in advancing the frontiers of human healthspan extension.
Longevity.Technology: This year’s agenda was a corker, and featured speakers grouped by topic which allowed a real focus on some of the most exciting longevity areas. We’ll be showcasing some of the speakers over the coming weeks, and who better to kick off our coverage than our own CEO, Phil Newman, who featured as part of the Strengthening Outreach session.
Find out what Phil has to say about longevity marketing, Chasm Theory and some rather weird dreams…
Phil Newman on…
Educating for longevity
Longevity education is the lowest sector for investment, but there should absolutely be more investment. That really starts at Med School because there’s retrospection in the industry. Although people like Evelyne Bischof are helping to educate the the marketplace, people are coming out of Med School with very little knowledge about longevity and the industry of which they are becoming a part. The amount of investment in longevity education is not big enough by any means at the moment, and the reason we’re doing our longevity clinics survey is to truly understand if there are people that are claiming to be longevity practitioners that actually aren’t clinically trained to be longevity practitioners. Because I think that’s going to be an issue that we’re going to lean into as a whole sector at some point.
Modelling longevity
In Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm, he shows how as a market grows, it moves from innovators through to early adopters. Some companies get over the chasm, some get over and then slip back due to disruption, and some don’t get across at all. The Gartner Hype Cycle moves from technology trigger through the peak of inflated expectations down into the trough of disillusionment, before away you go up the slope of enlightenment. But the interesting thing is where they correlate – there is a market developing and there are risks associated with that market.
Change is coming…
People like Bryan Johnson and even Kim Kardashian are getting the message about preventative medicine out there. One of the things that I think is massively important for this industry, with all the great work that’s going on, is that we need to have very, very reliable biological age tests that everybody stands behind. We’ve got 1.0 thanks to Steve Horvath, we’ve now got 2.0, and an increasing number of epigenetic players in the marketplace. And there are other markers as well – it’s not just about epigenetic testing. Over a period of time, especially when the medical communities start to get involved much more actively, is that we’re going to get to a point where there is an industry consensus on measuring and managing biological age, which we’re not at yet. We’re at 2.0, we’ll get to 5.0 over a period of time, and when we’re there, that, to me, is really when the industry is going to really change.
…and it will be explosive
The skinny jab has given the Novo Nordisk share price a nice boost, and fast forward a few years, what will the market look like in the context of similar longevity therapies? We’ll be undertaking research to understand when we’ll get to that point, whether that longevity treatment is a pill, an injection, an infusion, or whatever it may be. But when we get to that point, when we get to that hype cycle, it’s going to explode. We all know it’s going to explode – the question is when.
Longevity Summit Dublin 2024 runs from 13-16 June 2024. Early bird tickets available – bag your tickets now!
