“Since aging is a major cause of most forms of morbidity and mortality (perhaps 90% in the most technologically advance segments of society),  the time has come to harness the exponentially improving technologies empowering precision medicine to enable more years of youthful health and make it broadly accessible/affordable.”

George Church
PhD, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School

The following report tells the story of how each and every one of us will add at least a decade of healthy years to our lives. A new paradigm of preventative health has finally begun. We each now have the ability to find our personalised path to health. The near ubiquitous smartphone and quickly reducing cost of genetic sequencing is now allowing us to predict your future health and even more amazingly know exactly what actions you need to take every day to greatly increase it. 

This first report walks you through an overview of the building blocks of this paradigm shift and also a call to collaboration across all missioned aligned founders/scientists/leaders around the world. It is our responsibility as humans to make sure this new found health superpower is distributed to everyone and not just the few.

Pete Ward & Michael Geer
co-founders of Humanity

There is a common misconception that the longevity field is focused solely on the extension of lifespan. In truth, longevity is a combination of your state of health and lifespan. So, if you live beyond the average life expectancy of around 80 years old in good health, you could be described as having longevity. 

Population level longevity tends to be concentrated in areas known as ‘Blue Zones’, where inhabitants live longer and healthier than anywhere else on earth and where it is common to see nonagenarians leading active, healthy lifestyles. Blue Zones occur throughout the world across different cultural landscapes, such as the Greek island Ikaria, Okinawa in Japan, and Sardinia in Italy to name but a few. 

Human longevity has improved dramatically over the last 150 years. Let’s first consider life expectancy. In the United States, for example, average life expectancy in the late 1800s was around 40 years, while a baby born in the US today can reasonably expect to see their 77th birthday.

However, as the average life expectancy has increased, the number of years we remain in good health has been slower to catch up. Many people still do not reach old age due to age-related diseases, and most people spend their last years in ill health. Since aging is one of the main risk factors for most chronic pathologies, the prevalence of age-related disease has risen with the increasing average lifespan, creating a socio-economic challenge in developed societies. 

It is believed that multi-morbidity prevalence among those aged 65-74 years will rise from 45.7% in 2015 to 52.8% by 2035 (Andrew Kingston, 2018). Therefore, unless combined with enhanced years of health, increased life expectancy can translate into more years of misery and suffering, as we spend more years unable to perform the normal activities of daily living. A piloted objective population-wide study by the UK’s NHS found that British men and women currently live around 23% of their lives in poor health – remarkable figures in a developed western society such as the UK.

This imbalance between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy is what the longevity industry strives to address. Today, this is typically referred to as healthspan.

While our lifespan equates to the length of time we spend alive, our healthspan is the time we spend alive in optimal health. In the longevity field, more emphasis is placed on improving healthspan, although it can reasonably be expected that our average lifespan will also increase as a result.

“If you look at centenarians (people who live to be 100 years old) and what they do today, they only spend about 5% of their life afflicted by disease. The focus of the longevity sector is to compress “morbidity” (the time we spend with any disease) so that we spend the majority of our life in good health. 

“Longevity is an area worth investing in, as when we are able to create and determine the right combination of interventions, we should be able to help most people to live between 90 and 100 with less than 5% of that spent with any disease. For a majority of society this would mean a couple extra decades of healthy life to enjoy.”

Professor Eric Verdin
MD, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Buck Institute

The economics of longevity

A common misconception associated with longevity is that it will result in a negative economic impact on society due to the drain on resources associated with an aging population. It’s easy to see where this perspective comes from. Without a commensurate improvement in healthspan, an aging population may lead to societal challenges, including:

• Workforce shortages as retirees start to outnumber new entrants. 
• Asset market meltdowns and a drop in the savings rate as older people liquidate their assets to support themselves.
• Economic growth slowdowns due to labour and capital shortages.
• Fiscal stress, due to rising healthcare costs since diseases of old age are expensive to treat, not just medically, but also in terms of requirements for formal and informal care.

However, by improving healthspan and extending duration of active life, societies could actually improve their economic growth potential. 

Better health positively impacts labour supply, notably through a longer health expectancy, and healthier individuals can be assumed to produce more per hour worked. Taking advantage of both improved health status of the population and the extended duration of active life, could promote the growth potential of economies facing aging trends. In addition, a healthier elderly population will mitigate the impact of that aging population on the dependency ratio (Amadeo, 2020).

“Longer life is good, but making sure healthspan catches up with lifespan is staggeringly valuable. And that is why we should try to delay aging, because yes, you get a longer life, but you get it in better health.”

Andrew J. Scott
Professor of Economics, London Business School, Longevity Technology, July 2021

In a recent study, professors Andrew J Scott, David Sinclair and Martin Ellison evaluated the value of extending life expectancy, compressing morbidity and targeting aging (Ellison, Scott, & Sinclair, 2021). The study took an economic perspective by using the value of statistical life (VSL) model, calibrated to current US economic, health, and demographic data. This model allowed the researchers to place a monetary value on the financial gain from longer life, better health and changes in the rate at which we age. VSL represents the sum of the value of each remaining year of life, discounted to the present day and weighted by the survival rate. 

The study calculated that slowing down the aging process to extend life expectancy by one year, coupled with compressed morbidity, is worth $38tn to the US economy. For ten years, this amounts to $367tn.

So, the benefits of improving healthspan and life expectancy are clear. But, how, then, can we work to compress morbidity and improve our longevity?

How do we age and can we impact it?

“Everything in the wider environment impacts on our longevity: pollutants, green spaces, what we eat, how we exercise, stress levels, sleep… The more that we can equip people to understand that and give them the tools to take control, the more people can live a longer life and live a better quality of life.” 

Tina Woods
Healthy Longevity Champion for the National Innovation Centre for Ageing, Longevity Technology, November 2020

Our longevity is determined by a complicated interplay of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. These three things impact the body at a cellular and molecular level. Our genetic code is written into every cell of the body and can determine our risk for certain diseases and disorders, both mental and physical. Studies have continued to find connections between our genetic profiles and our likelihood of developing health problems, from breast cancer and heart attack to depression, obesity, and Alzheimer’s disease.

However, this is only half the story. Our lifestyle and the environment we live in can directly impact our genetics and many other components at a cellular level. Every day that we live we are accumulating damage at a cellular and molecular level due to our lifestyle and environment. As the damage accumulates, our bodies begin to change and we begin to experience the side effects of age, such as a loss of energy, aches and pains, hair graying and reduced healing. Eventually the damage reaches a tipping point which can cause the decline in an organ of a bodily system. The inability to repair damage consequently results in aging related morbidities and age-related disease.

While our genes and environment are more difficult to control, there are certain actions, or “Longevity interventions”, we can take to help safeguard our health and longevity on the path to living for longer. These range from lifestyles changes to supplements and even drugs that may help extend our healthspan. 

“Aging is the greatest risk factor for most diseases. Longevity medicine is, at its core, personalized preventative medicine and should be central in any modern medical education. We have emerging evidence that we can increase healthy aging and postpone age-related diseases.”

Dr Morten Scheibye-Knudsen
associate professor, University of Copenhagen, Longevity Technology, December 2021

For those that follow longevity research and public health advice, it is clear there are a wide range of potential interventions that could benefit your healthspan. However, it also becomes clear that longevity is not a one-size-fits all approach and what actions/interventions work for one person may not work for another. 

This is because different people age differently. Our genetics, lifestyles and environments are all different, so the specific sequence of events that drive aging is unique to everyone. For instance, one individual may experience age acceleration through excessive oxidative stress in their liver while the aging trajectory of another is dictated by insufficient clearance of cellular trash in their kidneys. This is reflected by the observation that within a population of individuals of the same age, there is considerable variation in the types and extent of disease as well as degree of functional impairment risk.

How to measure aging: chronological vs biological age

What this really means is that the probability of disease and functionality (and visual looks) of an individual may vary significantly from their actual calendar age (or chronological age) in that two 65-year-olds may not only look different but present with drastically different health statuses.

Chronological age is reflective of the number of times the earth has travelled around the sun since we were born. As it is universal and readily available, chronological age is a popular estimate of the rate of aging and health in daily life. But it is a far from perfect metric as chronological age does not measure any specific age-related changes taking place in the body (Ji, 2021).

 For example, older individuals of the same chronological age differ in their physical and cognitive functioning. This difference in health status is better reflected by an individual’s biological age. Unlike chronological age, the rate of biological aging is variable and often disproportionate with the amount of time passed (Ji, 2021). Overall, biological age is determined by the state of our cellular and physiological well-being, which, as we have discussed, is largely determined by our genetics, lifestyle and environment. As such, our biological age is a good indicator of our healthspan.

This means that the way we age is personal to us so how we treat our aging process should also be personalised. There is already quite a bit of evidence that individuals respond differently to lifestyle and environmental interventions. 

Proving the need for personalisation

Consider one of the most obvious human differences – men vs women. Studies have shown that hormones in men and women seem to respond differently to fasting; changes in caloric intake and even the timing of caloric intake can disrupt hormonal functioning in women, affecting ovulation, metabolism and mood. Considering these differences, it might be important to optimise your fast depending on your sex.

And it’s not just the benefits of fasting that may be sex dependent. Remember metformin? A recent study investigated whether the diabetes drug protected myocardial metabolism and longevity in female mice. Researchers found that 20-month-old female mice showed degenerative cardiac phenotypes, such as reduced ejection fraction, more cardiac collagen deposition, an increased heart weight-to-body weight ratio and augmented inflammatory gene expression. Metformin failed to extend lifespan of the female mice, instead displaying toxic effects, and despite lowered reactive oxygen species production, long-term metformin treatment did not improve cardiac function in the aged female mice.

But the need for personalisation is by no means limited to mitigating differences between the sexes. For example, exercise is seemingly a sure-fire way to reduce morbidity and extend your mortality. However, it might not impact us all in the same way. A study analysed around 5,000 different proteins in 654 moderately sedentary adults that were put through an identical 20-week endurance program. The aim was to identify if there was a personal response to the endurance programme between individuals.  

Sure enough, by the end of the study the researchers were able to identify individuals who weren’t getting much of a boost in their fitness (measured by proteins that determined Vo2 Max). Baseline levels of several proteins predicted who would respond to the exercise training protocol far better than any normal established patient factors. What this makes clear is we all respond to exercise differently – although it is less clear why. With access to the right information, it is possible for you to know which types of exercise will benefit your personal longevity goals, and which ones won’t. 

Supplements are another popular area of longevity where personalisation has a potentially crucial role to play. There could be multiple, synergistic levels of influence which could contribute to whether a supplement has efficacy for longevity in humans including: dietary habits, genetic background, health status, microbiome, metabolism, food environment, physical activity, socioeconomics, psychosocial characteristics and environmental exposures (NUTRI-FACTS, 2011). 

Furthermore, over-consumption of some nutrients could have a detrimental impact on morbidity, such as excess intake of calcium being associated with increased risk of cancer death (Stephen R Spindler, 2014) (Fan Chen, 2019). What this shows is that stocking up on the “best new longevity supplement” or downing B12 for energy might not be the solution for you personally and could even be detrimental. 

So, with so many conflicting messages out there, how are you meant to know what you should be doing to improve your healthspan and longevity? The most important thing is to understand your own personal health situation as well as you possibly can, and to monitor it closely as you make any attempt to intervene in your longevity… the data holds the answer.

“We all want to understand what actions we should be taking to be healthier. We now finally have the data around what’s working and for who.”

Pete Ward
co-founder, Humanity

We have already established that people age differently, so clearly one of the most obvious ways to make informed decisions to improve your healthspan is to monitor your biological age and attempt to improve it whenever possible. But how?

The aging process results in multiple traceable footprints on the molecular, cellular, organ, and functional level. These footprints can be tracked and quantified to estimate our biological age. Sensitive and quantifiable methodologies are required to precisely measure the rate of biological aging, especially since age-related changes primarily take place on the molecular and cellular level, gradually over the span of months and years. The evolution of such methodologies almost exclusively relies on AI and machine learning algorithms to make sense of changes in large quantities of health data across various demographics. This has led to the emergence of modern-day biological age diagnostics.

Today, a wide range of biological age diagnostic tools exist, each of them utilising unique data types and training procedures to measure the rate of biological aging. In general, calculating biological age requires the calendar age of a person, their health as relating to their age, and some “traceable footprint” that is reflective of the aging process (biomarker of aging). With these parameters in place, biological age diagnostics are trained (through the analysis of massive amounts of health and demographic data) to give an accurate assessment of an individual’s functionality, survival/mortality, and overall health status compared to other individuals of the same age demographic.  

Biological age diagnostics can at least partially predict lifespan, but this has limited utility. More importantly, it can quantify the differences between healthspan and chronological lifespan, especially when the models are trained on health parameters that are reflective of biological age as opposed to chronological age (Ji, 2021). The value of any biological age diagnostic tool resides in the ability to predict “trajectories of aging” where the accelerated ones would predict unhealthy aging and disease and decelerated ones would predict healthy longevity. 

By calculating an individual’s aging trajectory, biological age diagnostics offer the ability to assess the potential of various longevity therapies and interventions for slowing down the process of aging and even achieving rejuvenation. There are several different approaches to measuring this trajectory, including: 

• Aging clocks, which measure a single molecular process or signature that changes predictably with age.
• Biomarker tests, which measure distinct biomarkers that represent a matrix of health and aging features from multiple tissues.
• Physiological function tests, which measure various physical, cognitive and physiological functions that represent a matrix of health and aging features from multiple tissues. 
• Imaging tests, which scan the body to measure visual changes to various organs and tissues.
• Genetic tests, which look for gene variants that are predictive of aging features across multiple tissues as well as overall health and disease.
• Digital tests, which draw on data from wearable devices and a variety of other sources to calculate biological age and trajectory, leveraging machine learning concepts.

A focus on DNA methylation

One of the most popular measures of biological aging is DNA methylation, a biological process where methyl groups are added to the DNA molecule to turn on and off genes. Several aging clocks have been developed based on this process, and one of the top companies in this field is Illumina, a global leader in DNA sequencing and array-based technologies.

“Epigenetic changes come before genetic changes and they are quite stable, so they allow the possibility to predict disease or monitor changes in disease. Epigenetic markers change all of the time to help the body adapt and produce the right amount of proteins.”

Tiffany Morris
PhD; Marketing Manager Precision Health, Illumina

“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”

Hippocrates

Movement and exercise

We have all been told the health benefits of movement and exercise – scientific evidence shows exercise translates, for some people, into a 30% decrease in all-cause mortality and an extended life expectancy of 0.4-6.9 years! Physical activity reduces the risk of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and cancer. Clearly it has an impact on the aging process, and evidence is beginning to emerge on exactly how it does.

For example, Thomas Rando, professor of neurology at Stanford University, has been working in aging research for more than 20 years and published work on the effect of exercise on the muscles of older mice.

“What we found in a nutshell is that if we exercise old mice, the stem cells in those muscles appear more youthful, whereas when we exercise young mice, we don’t see any effect,” says Rando. “This could be due to several things, but one possibility is that, when we’re young, our stem cells are optimized and you can’t really make them much better. But as we get old, things change, and so the ability of our tissue to repair itself is slower and less effective. But with exercise, it turns out, you can restore that youthful repair process.”

Thomas Rando
Stanford University, Longevity Technology, August 2020

Considering the health benefits, it is surprising that 80% of people in the United States do not exercise enough. Since exercise can also improve mood and concentration by releasing endorphins, it is worthwhile to integrate different types of exercise into your daily routine, from walking or cycling to and from work, going to the gym or playing team sports.

Encouraging lots of movement throughout the day may also help – a Harvard study showed that even 15 minutes of relatively low intensity exercise each day can lead to a longer life. Reminding your body how to move will keep you healthier and happier in both the short and long term.

Mind and stress

With the demands of hectic modern life, it can be difficult to find moments to relax. Constantly elevated levels of cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, can damage health and accelerate aging. Prolonged stress has been shown to increase the risk of heart disease, addiction, mood disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as influencing metabolism and accelerating obesity-related disorders such as diabetes. Stress also causes trouble for our wellbeing, hampering our ability to regulate our emotions and reducing our ability to think clearly.

The older we get, the more stress hormones can affect us; too much cortisol over time can damage the hippocampus, affecting memory storage and retrieval. A recent five-year study even highlighted that stress might increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. A different survey demonstrated that the immune cells of highly-stressed women aged by an extra 10 years – if you weren’t stressed before, you will be now!

Reducing stress and releasing endorphins, the body’s natural stress relief hormone can prevent this. Enjoying activities from exercising, cooking, meeting with friends or having a relaxing glass of wine should be prioritised (yay!).

Adequate recovery

“No matter what species we are, we need to take care of our neurons. Whether you’re a worm or a human, you must sleep.”

Professor Lior Appelbaum
Bar-Ilan University, Longevity Technology, March 2022

Sleep gives the body a chance to recover from the daily demands of modern life. Researchers have found that, over time, sleep deprivation can increase the risk of developing chronic diseases like mood disorders, obesity and cardiovascular disease, jeopardising longevity. More than a third of Americans report that they sleep for less than seven hours on average – but is that enough? What is the optimum number of hours of sleep for health and longevity, and what are the best ways to get them every night?

Long term, getting less than needed (different people need different amounts) of sleep per night can accelerate epigenetic aging and increase the risk of developing more serious, chronic conditions that impact longevity. Researchers have even likened the protective health effects of high-quality sleep to that of diet and exercise. 

Chronic sleep deprivation disrupts the release of hormones that regulate processes like the metabolism, appetite and stress response. Over time, insufficient sleep can increase weight gain and lead to obesity, with those who get less than six hours of sleep per night being more likely to have excess body weight compared to those who get eight hours. It can also develop or exacerbate mood disorders like anxiety or depression, as low mood is linked to lack of sleep and vice versa. It may also reduce the effectiveness of the immune system, leaving the body more exposed to infection and increasing the likelihood of developing a common cold by three times.

Nutrition and fasting

We all know that our diet impacts health, hence the adage ‘you are what you eat’. In practice however, many people regularly eat the high-fat, low-nutrition processed food common to the modern Western diet. Considering that a balanced diet is key to health, these food types are fine in moderation. However, regular consumption can lead to heart disease, neurodegeneration and cancer, which have increased in prevalence due to the aging population.

There are many different nutritional diets out there that could result in healthy longevity. For example, eating the Mediterranean diet common to some of the world’s Blue Zones, where inhabitants often live beyond 90 years old, is a good place to start in eating for longevity. The diet is high in fruit and vegetables, which we are instructed to eat five-a-day of for good reason. Eating five portions of nutrient-rich fruit and veg every day is associated with lower risk of all-cause mortality. Whole grains should also form the basis of your diet and can be used to replace refined carbohydrates like white bread. 

Additional health benefits can come from eating nuts and berries, common to the Nordic diet, which are a source of healthy fats and polyphenols with antioxidant benefits. Drink-wise, feel free to indulge in green tea, coffee and hot cocoa, as a high intake can reduce the risk of all-cause mortality due to their high concentration of polyphenols.

Eating highly processed foods instead of whole foods can impair longevity and should be limited in the diet. The main culprits being red and processed meat, sugar and excessive alcohol consumption, which can all negatively impact health and longevity. Many humans think of themselves as carnivores, but red meat can cause an elevated inflammatory burden. Accelerated aging and renal dysfunction is linked to lower socioeconomic status and dietary phosphate intake. This could be mitigated by simply replacing some red meat with plant proteins.

“So now everybody’s fasting, and we don’t seem to realise that fasting is just a word. It’s like eating – is eating good for you? What does that mean? It can be good for you and terrible for you. It’s the same with fasting – it depends how you do it.”

Dr Valter Longo
Director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, Longevity Technology, January 2022

In addition to a balanced diet, it may be prudent to experiment with fasting. Used for centuries across cultures and religions, fasting is now used as an effective and sustainable weight loss method. It promotes weight loss through ketosis, the process by which the body switches from using food for energy to fat stores. Longer fasts place cells under nutrient stress, triggering the antiaging process of autophagy.

Fasting works for weight loss by reducing overall calorie consumption as well as harnessing the additional fat burning benefits of ketosis. Around 12-16 hours into a fast, blood glucose and insulin levels dramatically drop. This deactivates nutrient signalling pathways regulated by mTOR kinase, forcing the body into the fasting state. To prevent starvation, the body switches from using glucose from food for energy to metabolising its own fat stores, known as the G to K switch. Ketosis can promote weight loss, as well as improve metabolic function, reduce inflammation and enhance immune functioning.

The health benefits of fasting are related to its ability to induce autophagy, during which cells reuse their old and damaged organelles to achieve cellular rejuvenation. Autophagy is an ongoing cellular process that can be accelerated by longer fasts since it also balances energy sources during nutrient stress. Around 24 hours into a fast, autophagy is initiated through the TOR kinase pathway. Cellular renewal is thought to protect against age-related disease like cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, diabetes and cancer, safeguarding longevity

Supplements

“It’s still a problem to get drugs approved for aging, and I hope that gets solved. But in the meantime, I think the first set of really effective interventions may be supplements that get tested adequately, validated and then put it into widespread use, and so I’m very excited about this space.”

Dr Brian Kennedy
Distinguished Professor, National University of Singapore, Longevity Technology, September 2020

Beyond the lifestyle changes already mentioned, longevity supplements are in pole position to be the first set of effective interventions that can be tested adequately, validated and marketed for widespread use. Longevity supplements may have a positive age-delaying effect through their impact on the basic processes underlying aging. If we delve deeper into each of the hallmarks, our rate of aging appears to be controlled by conserved genetic and biochemical pathways, which include key proteins such as mTORC, AMPK and sirtuins. 

Popular longevity supplements on the market include spermidine, NAD+ boosters and resveratrol, which all purport to have antiaging and longevity benefits. Longevity supplements contain active ingredients that work on the primary hallmarks of aging that cause molecular and cellular damage, slowing them down. For example, spermidine supplements act as caloric restriction mimetic (CRM), which tricks the body into the fasting and induce autophagy.

A key challenge when taking supplements with the aim of improving health, is that we do not yet definitively know whether these healthspan-extension interventions are actually reducing the risk of illness or contributing to better longevity. Hence the need for effective methods of monitoring to determine what is working – and what isn’t.

Drugs and therapeutics 

Most drug-based approaches to extending longevity are still in the clinical development pipeline, requiring long, expensive clinical trials and regulatory approval before they can be used in the general population. 

The approved diabetes drug Metformin has long been championed as the first potential anti-aging drug, with doctors prescribing it off-label to patients. The drug was able to extend the average lifespans of nematodes and mice by 57% and 6% respectively. And in middle-aged humans a retrospective 2014 analysis by Cardiff University showed that those who took metformin also lived longer, on average, than healthy controls of the same age.

This has generated a lot of buzz, with researchers like Dr Nir Barzilai picking the drug up for use in the first trial (Targeting Aging with Metformin or TAME) designed with aging as an effective endpoint, and others speculating that the drug – when combined with exercise and caloric restriction – may produce even greater increases to Longevity.

However, it’s not all good news for metformin, with some studies suggesting that the drug may conflict with the benefits to healthy aging conferred by exercise.

For a perspective on the current state of geroscience drug development, we bring you the thoughts of Dr Kristen Fortney, co-founder and CEO of BioAge Labs. BioAge is developing a pipeline of drugs that target the causes of aging.

Dr Kristen Fortney
Co-founder and CEO of BioAge Labs

“As the CEO of BioAge, I am proud to lead a company that is creating drugs that target the molecular causes of aging. To this end, we deeply analyze longitudinal data from human biobanks, revealing the biological pathways that underlie aging as well as biomarkers that can be monitored to show that interventions are truly affecting the aging process. These analyses have allowed us to identify and develop multiple mechanistically independent drugs with enormous potential to positively affect the pathways that drive aging. Clinical trials of these promising medications are underway now.

Today, advances in aging biology, data collection, and computation are leading to breakthroughs in the development of longevity-based drugs. The resultant expansion in our clinical ability to slow and reverse aspects of aging will broaden the spectrum of treatable age-related disease, unlocking a future of longevity medicine in which safe, effective, and widely accessible medications can treat the root causes of aging and add healthy years to everyone’s lives.”

Our mission at Humanity is to directly add 1 billion healthy years to the people of the world by 2030. Our focus is to make this available to everyone and not just a select few. We believe that can only be accomplished together. This means through collaboration with those you heard from in this report and many other amazing teams globally. The key to that collaboration is to have a simple concrete metric that we can all rally behind. Weekly Added Years or The WAY is our suggested metric for all mission aligned teams around the world to have as their north star. It makes sure our teams all stay laser focused on the only thing that matters, giving each of us more healthy years to enjoy with our family and friends.

As highlighted, there are already many different ways that we can modulate our health and, with the longevity industry creating better and better interventions, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand exactly what interventions we should be taking in to enhance our health. From scientific studies, it is clear that what works for one may not work for another.  Biological age diagnostics are one of the ways we can begin to track whether what we are doing is really benefiting our health, so that we can live fully functional and disease free for much longer.

This report has given an overview of this new paradigm of preventative health where we each now have the ability to find our personalised path to health. Stay tuned for more reports from Humanity and our partners which will deepdive into each major component.

Pete Ward & Michael Geer
co-founders of Humanity