Free Radicals

Martin Borch Jensen is a scientist, entrepreneur and longevity advocate. He is the co-founder and CSO of Gordian Biotechnology, a company whose platform enables the simultaneous delivery and testing of hundreds of therapeutics in individual animals. They have raised over $60M from top investors like Founders Fund, Horizons Ventures, Fifty Years and the Longevity Fund. They also recently announced a partnership with Pfizer to apply Gordian’s proprietary mosaic screening platform to accelerate the discovery of therapeutic targets for obesity.Martin is also a prominent voice in the longevity community and activist. As founder and president of Norn Group, a do tank for longevity, he launched the Impetus Grants program, which has deployed roughly $34 million to scientists across 145 projects, with funding decisions made within 3 weeks to enable speed.In our conversation today, we cover the state of the longevity field, its major bottlenecks, theories of aging, the role of AI in longevity, and much more.

Today’s guest is Karl Pfleger. After spending a decade as one of the first AI researchers at Google from 2002 to 2011, he has dedicated himself to the cause of rejuvenation biotechnology for nearly a decade. He is a philanthropist, community builder, and prolific angel investor with over 35 investments into rejuvenation biotech startups. His website, agingbiotech.info, provides valuable information to the entire field, and his talks and X posts are highly insightful and influential within longevity. Karl has deeply researched and nuanced takes, and those really show in this conversation. We’ll cover why epigenetic reprogramming won’t solve aging, Karl’s investment strategy and what distinguishes true rejuvenation technology, and why better diagnostic technologies could be the key to personalized aging interventions. 

Dr. Daniel Ives is the founder of Shift Bioscience. Shift has built a novel single-cell aging clock that has enabled them to run high-throughput screens to discover genes that regulate aging, with the goal of identifying a therapy to systemically reverse aging.We’ll dive deep into Shift’s latest work on SB000, a germline-expressed gene that rejuvenates cells without inducing pluripotency, and SB101, a pro-aging gene whose inhibition both reverses cellular age and prevents fibrosis, opening a clear path to clinical development.Daniel also shares his philosophy on why reversing aging might be easier than we think, the coming cultural shift when anti-aging drugs become mundane reality, and why he won't rest until we can double human lifespan.

Polyphron is led by co-founder and CEO Matthew Osman, a twice-exited tech entrepreneur turned biotech founder. Matthew is building a computation-first tissue foundry that applies AI and lab automation to semi-autonomously replicate human tissues in a dish. Polyphron aims to create the world’s most efficient tissue foundry for regenerative medicine.Listen to this episode to learn more about the core bet and technological platform at Polyphron, the remarkable progress they’ve made on two programs in heart and brain tissue in just a year, and what’s next for the company.

Dr. Omri Amirav-Drory is a General Partner at NFX whose mission in life is to end involuntary death. Omri has backed companies like Mammoth Biosciences, Immunai, and Centivax, and has earned a reputation as one of the most respected seed investors in tech-enabled life sciences and longevity. He previously founded Genome Compiler and sold it to Twist Bioscience, which is now worth $2.5 billion. We’ll talk about why longevity research could solve America's biggest economic problems, Omri’s 4 step ABCD plan for beating death, and why AI alone won’t solve aging.

Dr. Jacob Kimmel is the President of NewLimit, a biotechnology company developing reprogramming medicines to treat age-related disease and extend human healthspan. Dr. Kimmel co-founded the company with Blake Byers and Bryan Armstrong, and has since raised over $300M from top venture capital funds like Kleiner Perkins, Dimension, Founders Fund, and Khosla Ventures. They expect to initiate their first clinical trial in a few years.Dr. Kimmel has garnered a reputation as one of the brightest minds in longevity and the intersection between artificial intelligence and molecular biology, and NewLimit is often cited as one of the most important companies building in longevity today.

Adam Gries is a serial entrepreneur with four successful exits, and products that have reached over eighty million users. He has now set his sights on creating a longevity revolution through his organization Vitalism. Vitalism is a moral philosophy and community of action, forming a revolutionary movement to get humanity to fight as hard as possible to achieve unlimited lifespans in peak health.Our conversation covers the state of the longevity field today, the myth of billionaires’ obsession with longevity, what it will take to revolutionize our culture and industry to treat aging seriously, and much more.

Dr. Janine Sengstack and Rob Cahill, founders of the startup Junevity, are on a mission to extend lifespan and healthspan by combining AI and large scale omics data with genetic medicines known as “siRNAs”. Their cellular reset platform promises to create medicines that can reset each of your organs back to a healthy and youthful state.This year, Junevity successfully restored "18-year-old metabolism" in animal models allowing mice on a high-fat diet to lose fat while retaining muscle. This candidate therapy may become the first known drug to rejuvenate metabolism. Since our recording, Junevity doubled their seed round funding up to $20M to advance this work into human clinical trials, which means we might see their first rejuvenating medicine in the clinic as soon as the second half of next year.

Lada Nuzhna is a researcher and founder driven by two questions: how did we get here, and how do we stay. Lada dropped out of college to pursue her biology research as a Thiel fellow, and to co-found Impetus Grants which funds breakthrough longevity science. Through Impetus, she has allocated over $34M to fund some of the most ambitious projects and clinical trials in aging. She is now developing a new therapeutic modality to target diseases of aging through her startup, General Control. In addition to her work as an investor and founder, Lada is a prolific author of short-form and long-form content, which you can find through her Twitter (https://x.com/ladanuzhna) and Blog (https://www.ladanuzhna.xyz).

Alex Colville, PhD, is a Co-founder and General Partner at Age1, one of the premier aging venture capital firms where he has invested in companies like Science, Gordian, Loyal, and General Control. Prior to that, he was an investor and founding chief of staff at Amaranth Foundation, where he invested in moonshot biology and aging initiatives. He got his biotech business career started as a management consultant at Putnam Associates and as a consultant to the Maze Therapeutics BD team and Rubedo Life Sciences R&D team. Alex earned his PhD at Stanford in the biology of aging.

Celine Halioua is the Founder & CEO of Loyal - the first company to ever receive FDA approval to develop a drug to extend lifespan in dogs, and they have raised $125mm from Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round and others to do so. By building a blockbuster longevity drug for dugs, Loyal aims to lay the foundation for safe and effective longevity drugs in humans. In this interview, Celine describes her thesis that longevity drugs should be boring, what it means to create a new market, how charlatans put the whole longevity field at risk, and much more. We hope you enjoy this episode.