Longevity Biotechnology: AI, Biomarkers, Geroscience for Healthy Aging
Drs. Alex Zhavoronkov, Morten Scheibye-Knudsen, Evelyne Bischof and Dominika Wilczok discuss their research paper that was published as the cover of Aging (Aging-US) Volume 16, Issue 20, entitled, “Longevity biotechnology: bridging AI, biomarkers, geroscience and clinical applications for healthy longevity.”
DOI - https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206135
Transcript
Listen to an audio version of the discussion
Hello, everybody and welcome to ARDD. So today is our usual Monday meeting. As you know, ARDD is 100% volunteer run. It lives thanks to the sponsorships that companies provide every year, but we are working on a volunteer basis. The executive chair of the conference is Morten Scheibye-Knudsen MD PhD. He organizes this conference together with Professor Daniela Bakula. Both of them are from the University of Copenhagen. And we also have Dr. Evelyne Bischof, who is organizing the Longevity Medicine Track dedicated to physicians. I am sponsoring and supporting the conference, also promoting it.
And today, we have a wonderful opportunity to discuss the meeting report from ARDD 2023. That was our 10th ARDD at the wonderful University of Copenhagen. And we’re going to talk about the paper, promote it, and explain the most recent trends.
So let me share the screen, but I would like to pass the word to Morten Scheibye-Knudsen to talk about how this paper originated. I hope you can see my screen, see the paper. It went out just about a couple weeks ago in Aging. Unfortunately, the editor of Aging, Misha Blagosklonny, the founder of Aging, just recently passed away, so rest in peace. And we need to acknowledge all his contributions to the longevity by technology, aging science to geroscience and founding this wonderful journal.
So Morten, would you like to introduce ARDD and pass the word to our other colleagues?
Yeah, thank you so much. So I’m really happy that this paper came out. It’s a huge amount of work compiling what happens during ARDD, and ARDD 10 was the largest one we had so far that year. It of course got larger at ARDD 11, but I’m extremely happy that this paper came out and it’s really also volunteer based. It’s three participants at the meeting that took up the huge challenge of compiling these 100 speakers into a paper that’s really nice and manageable and really condenses the field that we have right now. So extremely happy that this came out. And, of course, also very happy for the co-authors on the paper and the people participating in the organization of ARDD, as well.
So maybe we should go to Eva to talk a little bit about one of the more exciting aspects of ARDD, which is the clinical transition that we’re seeing in the field.
Before, I just wanted to mention that we have 125 affiliations on a paper. Imagine how much work it takes just to put that through a peer review process. And I know that the volunteers who manage to get this paper published submitted it several times, so that takes a lot of guts and a lot of patience. Thanks to everybody who participated.
Thank you so much. It’s a great honor and pleasure to be involved and very grateful to the organizers and chairs of ARDD that have implemented Longevity Medicine First workshop, then Longevity Medicine Day and recently also Longevity Medicine Track to the program. As clinical longevity medicine is growing, as the field is expanding, not only to translation of Geroscience to clinical practice in individuals, but really also into hospitals, into clinical settings at larger scale and even to public health domains. It was really a great addition and very well-percepted also from the participants.
So our day was focusing on the clinical applications on the current recommendations, potentially further also standards and guidelines. And, of course, giving a platform not only a frontal lecture, but really giving a platform for all of those physicians, healthcare professionals, public health figures, health insurance representatives, and also pharma representatives who are always joining the day, or now also the track, with great interest.
Figure 1. Timeline of longevity biotechnology. Key breakthroughs the AI, Biomarkers and clocks, Geroscience, and Clinical trials and applications in ageing and longevity fields since 2013.
And in ARDD in 2023, we had wonderful representatives, not only from clinical settings, great figures, Professor Nir Barzilai, Professor Tom Randolph, Professor James Kirkland, but also representatives from a cross section that is so crucial for us physicians to practice. For example, Dr. Michael Ringel, who is very much focused on the medical economy, thinks that we need in order to further implement the tools into clinical practice. But I will leave the details of the compilation of the talks that happened on Longevity Medicine Days 2023 to Dominika, who helped with the great team of volunteers to really compile it together.
Thank you so much Dr. Evelyne, and I will share my screen so that we can all follow the same track.
And yes, first I wanted to highlight just like Alex, Morten and Evelyne mentioned before, a huge shout out definitely to Professor Yu-Xuan Lyu, Professor Qiang Fu and … all of them and all the team put a lot of effort into writing this paper because the process, how we approached it, is we watched every single talk that was recorded, read the transcripts, and highlighted the quintessence of every single talk. And as Alex mentioned, 126 speakers, this was comprehensive work. However, that was the work that just gave unprecedented knowledge on the latest advancements in the field. So we have people who are affiliated with every single part of the world.
And right now, let’s go through the overview of the process. So we started with AI in aging research because we agreed that this is the most disruptive technology that allows for such wide data analysis that was not attainable before. So we divided the text by focusing on AI-driven biomarkers of aging. And recently the confidence of biomarkers of aging helped that Harvard also gathered speakers who are co-authors on this paper. So I highly recommend checking it out.
One thing to very importantly notice is that each of the references that you can see here, these are not just random references to literature. Each and single one of them is co-authored by one of the people who are in the consortium here who have co-authored the paper. So it’s all from ARDD. So every single reference is ARDD linked.
So from AI-driven biomarker discovery, we went into AI in drug discovery and longevity science. And so this paper, it was originally submitted in March, so it did not include some of the latest highlights in AI drug discovery, such as in Silico’s completing the phase 2-A study for IPF. So as you can see, field is changing extremely rapidly. That’s why we need the paper for 2024 analysis of ARDD.
However, before that is coming, we can see that we also included the timeline of how longevity biotechnology has been changing in the last 10 years. You can see a lot of points here, and I’m sure that in the next review, a lot more will be added because this is such a disruptive field that every single day published papers just expand our views on what is happening.
So then continuing with AI, of course, we focused on aging clocks and deep aging clocks, highlighting methylation clocks … and deep aging clocks developed more recently, as well as other AI applications.
And then we agreed during our many meetings on how to make this paper not only a summary of ARDD, but actually a useful tool for everybody who wants to know more about aging research, about longevity biotechnology. We decided to divide the section into analyzing every hallmark of aging … of aging paper and synthesize everything what was said during ARDD 2023 about the specific hallmark.
Figure 3. Integration of AI, biomarkers and clocks, geroscience, and longevity medicine in advancing human healthspan.
So over the next pages, I will not dive deeply into this, rather highlight the work that went into dividing that into every specific hallmark, and again, shouting out to the authors for not only producing the massive amount of research behind that, but also making it digestible for the reader.
And then moving forward, very important part, just like Dr. Evelyne was mentioning, healthy aging and healthy longevity medicine, transition from sick care to health-oriented longevity medicine. That’s the synthesis of the Longevity Medicine Day. So everything focusing more on the clinical physician aspect is also state of the art for 2023 ARDD. We highlighted the process of the patient who goes through the longevity medicine consultation.
And then, just like Dr. Evelyne was mentioning before, we highlighted how the economy of aging and more political science, social policy is also changing with this research. Because as we have to acknowledge, aging research is not happening in the vacuum, only in the lab, but its effects are visible not only in the papers, but also in the clinic and then on the societal level. So I highly encourage everyone to take a look at this paper. It’s available on PubMed, on Aging-US, and if you Google longevity biotechnology at ARDD 2023, you’ll for sure find this paper.
So I am personally very grateful for the opportunity to work on this. And I’m also very excited for the paper of ARDD 2024.
Yeah, so here it’s also very important to acknowledge the contribution of Daniela Bakula, who is the corresponding last author on this paper, and who is co-chairing the ARDD. She’s not here with us today, but she usually helps run this weekly meeting.
It’s also very important to note that ARDD usually takes approximately 54 to 56 weeks to prepare. So the preparation starts way before this year’s conference begins, just to ensure that everybody gets the complete ARDD experience. It brings together scientists, high-profile academics from all over the world who now recognize the importance of this conference. It also brings together the pharmaceutical companies. So from the very inception, the conference was designed to bring together high-profile industry players, mostly big pharmaceutical companies, big bio-pharmaceutical companies, together with high-profile academics, and also attract multiple startups.
So in 2024, more than 40 startups sponsored the conference, and many notable investors investing in longevity. Some of them come to the conference for the first time after reading conference reports, because aging will never get old when it comes to investing. When it gets old, we can all go home and enjoy the world of abundance.
And it also brings together the media and the top academic research editors, so the editors of top highly ranked journals would be present at the event. It’s also very full of social activities. It’s the only event of this size, scale, and length. It takes the entire week. And many companies and many academics come even earlier for pre-conference or post-conference meetings. And it also unites the industry. Many clinicians travel to the conference.
So in 2025, you should expect a much broader and much more vibrant experience because the conference always steps up every year, especially with more and more participation from big pharmaceutical companies that finally started adding aging research into their corporate strategies.
So thank you very much for looking at this paper, and please read it, share it, tweet it, send it to your friends, and invite them to ARDD 2025. So please come to ARDD.
That’s the ARDD sign. Register. And this would not have been possible without the careful support and guidance from Stephanie Tsang, who is putting a lot of effort into this conference, as well. Thanks so much.
