Longevity InTime aims to track 400+ biomarkers of health in ‘real time’ … starting with millionaires (as both users and investors).
From wearable devices and apps that monitor our physical activity, sleep and more, to various biological age and omics profiling tests, there are many ways that we can measure and track our health. As we discussed yesterday, there is a clear need to reach consensus on the biomarkers of aging and how to measure them. More on this soon.
But even if consensus is reached, how do we put those biomarkers of health into practice to benefit human beings? Biohackers like Tim Gray and Oksana Andreiuk will no doubt attest to the fact that measuring multiple biomarkers requires a lot of time and effort.
Russian serial entrepreneur Oleg Teterin, whose diverse CV includes a producer credit for critically acclaimed Hollywood movie Chef, is on a mission to address this challenge. The businessman is the driving force behind Longevity InTime, a start-up building an online health tracking technology designed to predict and prevent disease.
“What was the point of going to work to earn money, to lose health, and then to use the money to try to buy the health back?”
“Back in 2012, before I started work on Chef, I was thinking about Longevity,” says Teterin when we caught up with him recently. “What was the point of going to work to earn money, to lose health, and then to use the money to try to buy the health back?”
“And, in most cases, you cannot buy health back,” he adds, citing examples of famously wealthy people like Apple founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft founder Paul Allen, who passed away in their 60s.
Then, in 2018, Teterin heard about the work of Jun Wang at iCarbonX and was inspired. This led him to consult with several Russian scientists over the next two years as he built his plans for a company focused on consumer health and disease.
“Most people in the world die, not because of age, but because of disease, so the main challenge is to catch the disease in the proper time so you have enough time to fight it,” says Teterin. “I realised that the only solution was online tracking with instant measurements of your parameters, without any inconveniences and in a user-friendly, understandable way, to present the real results and the recommendations which are very easy to follow and very easy to be validated by a treating doctor.”
“Our idea is not to develop new devices, it is to use AI and machine learning technologies to calculate the most accurate risk for the top 20 severe diseases and to do it in real-time.”
And so Longevity InTime came into being. The company is building a solution that combines several technological elements and aims to ultimately track more than 400 health biomarkers. This will include around 50 parameters gathered in real-time by a mobile application linked to wearable devices, including food tracking and environmental factors, as well as a range of other biodata. The company is already leveraging data gathered by existing wearable technologies, including Apple’s HealthKit and the Google Fit platform, and aims to integrate others over time.
“Our idea is not to develop new devices, it is to use AI and machine learning technologies to calculate the most accurate risk for the top 20 severe diseases and to do it in real time,” says Teterin.
The other 350+ biomarkers will be tracked on a monthly basis using a patented “container” that is designed with different compartments for users to take blood, urine, skin, hair and nail samples, and then send it via courier service for full-spectrum analysis in a mass spectrometer lab.
The data collected from each user will then be analysed online in Longevity InTime’s AI server, bringing it together with data collected from the world’s leading medical databases to create a forecast of life expectancy and provide recommendations for its extension.
“We’re one of the biggest biotech start-ups where zero salary is paid every month.”
“We have hired about 10 high professional AI machine learning specialists who are making the algorithm for extracting the structured data from databases, such as PubMed and Mimic, which are relevant to the same 400 parameters taken from the person,” says Teterin.
In total, Longevity InTime has around 30 people in six countries working on its technologies, which is impressive, given that the company is currently self-funded by Teterin and so everyone is working for equity. “We’re one of the biggest biotech start-ups where zero salary is paid every month,” he says.
But despite the low cost of staff, funding is still necessary and Longevity InTime is looking for $1.5 million to cover the cost of patents in the G20 countries.
The cost of tracking so many biomarkers on a regular basis isn’t insignificant, and Teterin admits that he expects initial pricing to be as high as $50,000 per year. Little wonder then, that his initial target customers are the millions of millionaires aged 50 and above across the world.
“These high net worth individuals, they’re mostly the same target audience as our potential investors,” he says. “We’re also looking for investors for the big game, because we want to bring this company to a hundred billion valuation or even more, because we understand that tracking person’s future is priceless.”
Despite the high cost of its full service option, Teterin expects it to come down over time and Longevity InTime is also developing a range of “MVP” mobile apps that are available either for free or low cost to consumers, including apps targeted for obesity and coronavirus.
