image: Alex Zhavoronkov Pledges to Dedicate the Rest of His Life and Assets to Extending Productive Longevity for Everyone on the Planet view more
Credit: Deep Longevity
Tuesday, 25th of October, 2022 (11AM EST) – Today, Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, the founder and Chief Longevity Officer of Deep Longevity, the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, and adjunct professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, formally announced the “Longevity Pledge”. Through this pledge professor Zhavoronkov committed all of his wealth and resources as well as all of the remaining time to supporting and developing research and clinical solutions for extending healthy productive longevity for everyone on the planet.
“In my opinion, extending productive longevity for everyone on the planet is the most altruistic cause. Extending everyone’s quality life just by one year would yield roughly 8 billion quality life years not even accounting for the future generations. And, considering the current demographic situation, political climate, and the slow progress in biomedical sciences, there is no time to waste. I hope that my example will motivate the other people with similar background to not only commit their wealth but also their intellect, skills, and ingenuity to this strangely underappreciated cause. But I also want to ensure that I very clearly define the mission, long- and near-term objectives for myself as in today’s world it is easy to get distracted”, said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD.
In October 2022, during the Longevity Month, professor Zhavoronkov decided to announce that he made the “Longevity Pledge”, where he committed his entire fortune, as well as 100% of his time to be spent on projects focused on extending human productive longevity. He also explained the economics of quality-adjusted life years (QALY) in the context of the Effective Altruism philosophy and provided the rationale for extending healthy productive life for the others instead of focusing on building the family and hoarding wealth. He does not plan to leave the inheritance.
His plan is to invest the majority of his resources in companies with the potential to extend healthy productive life and can form the longevity ecosystem. These companies can grow, become sustainable, give rise to other companies, and return profits that can be reinvested in other longevity enterprises. He also outlined his non-profit priorities.
Professor Zhavoronkov outlined five major areas of his focus for the near and long-term future:
- The development of drug discovery and development platform that can significantly derisk, accelerate, and democratize the discovery of novel therapeutics. The cost of drug discovery and development may exceed $3 Billion per one novel drug on the market. The process from disease hypothesis and target discovery to launch of the drug in the clinic usually takes 12 years and fails 99% of the time. This is a major bottleneck for any longevity project and needs to be solved. Insilico Medicine is currently at the forefront of this industry and is utilizing AI and robotics together with expert teams around the world to achieve this mission.
- AI-powered aging clocks - AI-powered systems that can track the minute changes in the body over time using multiple data types. These systems can help identify the main drivers of aging and can be used to evaluate the efficacy of the different interventions. There is a need to measure the effectiveness of different geroprotectors.
- Personalized Drug Discovery - relates to point #1. It may be possible to develop fully-automated systems not only to prioritize the existing drugs for individual patients but also discover novel therapeutics and therapeutic combinations for individual patients. Starting from diseases and expanding into aging.
- Novel approaches in cryobiology and biostasis. Recent advances in rapid reheating, the use of novel gas chemistry combinations using AI and isochoric cryopreservation are likely to allow us to rapidly freeze and unfreeze organs, and possibly entire bodies to enable long-term storage, transport, and even time travel into the future for the terminally-ill or irreparably frail. These technologies are likely to result in the creation of new industries in the future.
- AI and Robotics-driven Hospitals - this project combines all four areas under one research and clinical infrastructure enabling rapid therapeutic discovery and repair. The creation of an AI- and Robotics- driven preventative and regenerative research hospital in a secure environment and with a community of dedicated scientists is professor Zhavoronkov’s grand goal.
About Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD
Professor Zhavoronkov is Latvian and Canadian. He did his two bachelor degrees at Queen’s University in Canada, worked in the telecommunications and graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor industry (GPUs are used to train deep neural networks), but in 2004, he firmly decided to dedicate the rest of his life to aging research and longevity biotechnology. He did his masters at the Johns Hopkins University, his PhD in biophysics at MSU, worked at a number of labs and ran the bioinformatics and regenerative medicine laboratories at one of the largest pediatric hematology, oncology, and immunology research centers. He also worked at and consulted a number of biotechnology, brain-computer interface companies, and charitable foundations. In 2014, he founded Insilico Medicine, one of the first and largest AI-powered clinical-stage biotechnology company with end-to-end drug discovery capabilities. At Insilico he raised over $415 million, developed 8 preclinical candidates, and took the aging research- and AI-discovered and AI-designed antifibrotic drug into human clinical trials. He also founded Deep Longevity, which is now part of a publicly-traded Endurance Longevity, a company specializing in aging biomarkers, and published the first aging clocks using deep learning. In 2013, he founded Aging Research for Drug Discovery (ARDD) conference in Basel, Switzerland, which moved to the University of Copenhagen in 2019. Today it is the largest industry conference in longevity biotechnology. Since 2012 he published over 160 peer-reviewed articles including in Nature, Science, PNAS, and many other top journals. He also wrote a book called “The Ageless Generation” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013 which was sold in most of the largest bookstore chains including Barnes and Noble and Chapters. In this book he explained the pressing need to accelerate aging research to revive the global economy and avoid economic collapse in the developed countries. Since 2018, he contributes to Forbes.com and publishes 1-5 articles every month covering AI and longevity.
Learn more about the Longevity Pledge at www.LongevityPledge.org,