Beyond Longevity

Beyond Longevity explores the science, medicine, technology, business and policy shaping longer, healthier lives. Host Daphna Stern speaks with leading researchers, clinicians, founders and experts about ageing biology, healthspan, preventive medicine, longevity biomarkers, AI in healthcare, nutrition, women’s health and the societal impact of longer lives. Each episode examines the evidence, separates credible science from hype and translates complex research into clear, practical conversations.

Beyond Longevity is a health podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 0 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

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  Episode #33

  Beyond Longevity at HLTH Europe Part Two: Microbiomes, Breath Diagnostics and the Future of Medical AI

  Sep 6, 202657 minS1

  Recorded at HLTH Europe in Amsterdam, Part Two of our special series looks at four very different ways technology could help healthcare move earlier, become more personalised and make better use of the growing amount of health data we are collecting. Dr Marta Ciechonska, Co-Founder and CEO of Salient Bio, explores what the microbes living in our gut, mouth and vaginal microbiome can tell us about health. She explains how metagenomic testing and machine learning are being used to move microbiome science towards clinical diagnostics, including work in inflammatory bowel disease, as well as the links between oral health, systemic inflammation and changes associated with menopause. Ilay Marom, Co-Founder and COO of NaNose Medical, introduces a very different approach to early detection: analysing biomarkers in our breath. He explains how nanosensors and AI can identify patterns associated with diseases including lung cancer and advanced liver fibrosis, what the technology is actually measuring, how accurate it could become and whether breath testing could eventually make large-scale screening more accessible and affordable. Aad R. Liefveld, Chief Growth Officer at PACE Clinical, tackles a problem that has little to do with discovering new treatments and everything to do with whether patients actually follow them. We discuss why people struggle with adherence, how behavioural modelling can identify patients at risk of dropping out or deviating from treatment protocols, and why poor adherence can distort the results of clinical trials themselves. Finally, Ruth Prieto of Nebius takes us behind the scenes of medical AI. We discuss the computing infrastructure required to power increasingly complex healthcare applications, from drug discovery to diagnostics, alongside the questions around privacy, security, regulation and what meaningful AI adoption in healthcare actually looks like. Together, the conversations raise a broader question running through much of HLTH Europe: can we use technology not simply to collect more health data, but to detect problems earlier, intervene more intelligently and ultimately keep people healthier for longer? Marta Ciechonska - Salient Bio https://www.linkedin.com/in/marta-ciechonska/ Salient Bio Ilay Marom - Co-Founder & COO at Nanose Medical https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilay-marom-846793218/ Nanose Medical - Nanose -Disease diagnosis - Official Website Adriaan Rudolf (Aad) Liefveld - https://www.linkedin.com/in/liefveld/ https://www.paceclinical.com/ Ruth Prieto - Communications Manager and External Communications PR lead at Nebius https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-prieto/ The Ultimate AI Cloud Find out about HLTH Europe https://hlth.com/events/europe/ See you there next year Running order 00:00 Back at HLTH Europe 01:49 Microbiome Diagnostics 05:24 From Testing to Prevention 08:28 Breath Biomarkers for Earlier Detection 11:18 How Breath Sensing Works 15:50 Accuracy, Cost and Accessibility 18:05 Scaling Preventive Diagnostics 23:30 Why Patients Struggle With Adherence 28:50 The Behaviour Behind Non-Adherence 30:14 B-COMPASS and Proactive Support 31:08 The Clinical Trial Dropout Problem 32:03 How Protocol Deviations Distort Data 34:16 Rethinking Clinical Trials and R&D 37:56 Who Should Pay for Better Adherence? 40:46 Making Health Technology Accessible as We Age 42:37 The Infrastructure Behind Medical AI 46:37 How AI Is Changing Drug Discovery 47:41 Privacy, Security and Real-World AI 49:58 Breakthrough Projects and Recognition 55:33 Closing Reflections

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  Episode #32

  Beyond Longevity at HLTH Europe: Wearables, AI and Remote Rehabilitation for Preventive Health

  Aug 30, 202643 minS1

  What happens when technology stops simply tracking our health and starts helping us understand what to do about it? Recorded at HLTH Europe in Amsterdam, this episode of Beyond Longevity features three conversations with founders working across very different areas of health technology. From understanding our individual stress response and making sense of an overwhelming amount of health data, to bringing rehabilitation into the home, these conversations explore what preventive health could actually look like in practice. Timothée Manschot, Founder and CEO of NOWATCH, is rethinking what a health wearable should do. NOWATCH continuously measures signals including electrodermal activity to understand how an individual’s body responds to stress and builds a personalised baseline over time. We discuss what Timothée calls “compassionate technology”, why more health data isn’t necessarily better, and NOWATCH’s unusual approach to privacy, where users remain in control of their own data. https://www.linkedin.com/in/timmanschot/ Nowatch - Polsen Health | Screenless Health Tracker for Stress, Sleep, Activity & Recovery Samir Mitra, Founder and CEO of REYA.AI, has spent decades at the forefront of technology. He was part of the original Java team at Sun Microsystems and later became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Sequoia Capital. Today, he’s applying that experience to longevity medicine. REYA.AI helps clinicians bring together medical records, blood tests, genetics, wearables and other health data, using AI to identify what actually matters. We discuss where AI can outperform humans, where it can’t, and why Samir believes clinical judgement and context still need to remain at the centre of healthcare. https://www.linkedin.com/in/samir-mitra-1623164/ Reya Ai Roy Shteren, CEO and Co-Founder of WizeCare Technologies, is tackling another major challenge: how to make rehabilitation available to more people without requiring every session to happen face-to-face. WizeCare uses AI and movement tracking to support remote physiotherapy without additional hardware. We explore how the same technology could go beyond recovery and help identify changes in movement, mobility and fall risk before they become a bigger problem. https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-shteren/ https://www.wizecare.com/ Find out more about HLTH Europe: https://hlth.com/events/europe/ See you there next year. Next week: Part Two from HLTH Europe, where we explore the microbiome, breath-based disease detection, patient adherence and the AI infrastructure behind medical research. Timestamps 00:00 Welcome to HLTH Europe in Amsterdam 01:04 What We’re Exploring 02:00 Timothée Manschot and NOWATCH 04:08 Understanding Your Stress Baseline 05:25 What Is Compassionate Technology? 08:13 A Privacy-First Approach to Health Data 15:22 Wearables, Health and Longevity 17:29 Samir Mitra and REYA.AI 21:32 How AI Can Help Clinicians 23:17 Why Human Judgement Still Matters 29:01 Where Could Healthcare AI Be in 10 Years? 33:16 Roy Shteren and WizeCare 36:51 From Rehabilitation to Prevention 38:59 Can Remote Rehabilitation Scale? 41:17 Final Thoughts and Part Two

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  Episode #31

  Can a Senolytic Vaccine Slow Ageing? Dr David Scieszka on Senescent Cells and Longevity

  Aug 23, 202657 minS1

  What if a vaccine could help the immune system clear senescent “zombie” cells — damaged cells linked to ageing, chronic inflammation and age-related disease? In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Daphna Stern sits down with David Scieszka, PhD, MBA, a biomedical scientist, computational biologist, and Founder and CEO of Vertical Longevity Pharmaceuticals (VeLo Pharma). His route into longevity has been anything but conventional, spanning service in the US Army, wet-lab science, computational biology and, eventually, biotech entrepreneurship. VeLo Pharma is developing a senolytic vaccine designed to help the immune system recognise and remove senescent cells. Often described as “zombie cells”, these are damaged cells that have stopped dividing but remain active. As they accumulate with age, they can contribute to chronic inflammation, tissue dysfunction and age-related disease. The company’s first focus is atherosclerosis, where plaque builds up inside the arteries. The aim is to target senescent cells within the vasculature — the network of blood vessels that carries blood around the body — as a potential new way of tackling vascular ageing and cardiovascular disease. But this conversation goes far beyond one experimental vaccine. David and Daphna explore one of the biggest problems in longevity science: why so many promising discoveries look exciting in the lab, yet so few make the difficult journey into treatments that patients can actually use. They discuss where artificial intelligence can genuinely help drug development — and where the hype may run ahead of the science — what animal and primate studies can and cannot tell us, and what evidence would be needed before an approach like this could move towards human trials. David also talks candidly about the business of building a biotech company: learning how to approach investors, getting the fundraising ask wrong, understanding what investors actually need to see, and building a company around a mission that goes beyond simply creating another expensive longevity treatment. Running through the conversation is an even bigger question: if we do find effective ways to slow parts of the ageing process, who gets access to them first? Will longevity medicine remain something available primarily to those who can afford it — or can longevity eventually become something for everyone? Guest David Scieszka, PhD, MBA Biomedical scientist, computational biologist, and Founder and CEO Vertical Longevity Pharmaceuticals (Velo Pharma) Vertical Longevity Pharmaceuticals LinkedIn - Vertical Longevity Pharmaceuticals Reach out to David on LinkedIn to find out about the upcoming “Ask VeLo Pharma Anything” 00:00 Welcome and Big Question 00:25 Meet David Cheska 02:53 Army Roots of Longevity 04:38 Choosing Biotech Path 05:49 Wet Lab Meets Computation 08:48 AI Promise and Limits 13:19 Longevity for All Mission 16:54 Vascular Ageing Explained 19:29 Senescent Cells 101 22:31 Lytic Vaccine Overview 24:11 Dosing and Study Strategy 26:12 How VLP Vaccines Work 29:02 Safety and Public Trust 29:58 Vaccine Safety Basics 31:14 Senescent Cells Strategy 32:42 Evidence So Far 35:35 Primate Trial Goals 36:40 Why Translation Fails 39:55 Personalised Longevity Care 42:41 PhD MBA Path 44:51 Fundraising Lessons 49:35 Mission-Driven Team 51:32 Longevity Next Decade 53:16 Rapid Fire Wrap 55:17 Final Takeaways

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  Episode #30

  Can One Drug Slow Ageing Across the Whole Body? LinkGevity’s Bid to Block Necrosis

  Aug 16, 20261h 7mS1

  What if heart disease, kidney disease and dementia share a common mechanism linked to ageing? And what if blocking a destructive form of cell death called necrosis could help protect several organs at once? In this episode, host Daphna Stern speaks with LinkGevity founders Dr Carina Kern and Serena Kern-Libera about their attempt to develop a new longevity drug targeting necrosis, ageing and age-related disease. Their work challenges the conventional model of drug discovery. Medicine generally treats kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and dementia as separate conditions. LinkGevity is asking whether targeting biology shared across these diseases could protect several organs and systems at once. At the centre of that approach is necrosis: a destructive form of cell death that can spread damage through surrounding tissue. LinkGevity’s lead candidate, Anti-Necrotic™️, is designed to protect cells from the calcium overload that drives this process. The company is preparing for clinical trials in kidney disease, while investigating whether the same mechanism could eventually have wider applications across ageing, organ preservation and tissue engineering. The work has received support from Innovate UK, Horizon Europe, the Francis Crick Institute and the UK Space Agency. LinkGevity was also selected as one of 12 companies for the SPACE-H accelerator, run in collaboration with NASA’s Human Research Program, TRISH and Microsoft Federal. The conversation explores the Blueprint Theory of Ageing, the limitations of treating age-related diseases one at a time, and why the kidney may provide a practical first route into human trials. It also examines what the existing laboratory evidence can—and cannot yet—tell us, what would disprove the company’s theory, and how LinkGevity is trying to separate scientific ambition from longevity hype. Dr Carina Kern is the founder and CEO of LinkGevity, an AI-enabled biotech company developing treatments for ageing and the loss of biological resilience. A geneticist and ageing researcher, she is the architect of the Blueprint Theory of Ageing, an integrative framework connecting evolutionary principles, genetic pathways, molecular mechanisms and clinical medicine. The theory underpins LinkGevity’s AI-driven drug-discovery platform. Serena Kern-Libera is co-founder, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel of LinkGevity. Before founding the company with her sister, she worked at Magic Circle law firm Slaughter and May, the Bank of England and HM Treasury, and served as Private Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Together, they lead a multidisciplinary team based at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge. Their lead programme is initially targeting kidney disease, but its larger ambition is to test whether blocking necrosis could help protect the body against several forms of age-related degeneration. You can find out more here: LinkGevity: www.linkgevity.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/linkgevity/ X: @CarinaCarlaKern Research papers: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41388… https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202310.1387 Timestamps * 00:00 — Introducing Dr Carina Kern, Serena Kern-Libera and LinkGevity * 02:30 — The family story behind the company * 05:40 — Lifespan, healthspan and the fear of prolonged ill health * 07:30 — Early C. elegans research and publishing findings that challenged convention * 11:00 — From academic research to building a company at Babraham * 13:15 — The Blueprint Theory of Ageing and the case for systems-level medicine * 17:00 — Can ageing be defined and measured well enough to regulate? * 21:30 — What GLP-1 drugs reveal about system-level treatments * 25:00 — Should kidney disease, heart disease and dementia be treated separately? * 27:45 — What the hallmarks of ageing explain—and what they may miss * 31:00 — What would disprove the Blueprint Theory? * 33:20 — Necrosis and apoptosis: two very different forms of cell death * 37:00 — How necrosis can spread tissue damage * 41:00 — Calcium overload and how Anti-Necrotic™️ is designed to work * 45:00 — The laboratory evidence so far * 48:30 — Why necrosis remains a barrier to growing organs in the lab * 52:00 — The route to human trials, beginning with kidney disease * 55:00 — NASA, the UK Space Agency and “cosmic kidneys” * 59:00 — Working with the NHS and the case for a gateway trial * 1:02:30 — Longevity hype, scientific rigour and the risks of the label * 1:06:00 — Is society prepared for a genuine breakthrough in healthspan? * 1:09:00 — What each sister is most afraid of getting wrong * 1:11:00 — Rapid-fire five questions * 1:14:00 — Closing reflections and host takeaway

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  Episode #29

  How Much Control Do We Really Have Over Our Health? Spermidine, Autophagy and Patient Empowerment

  Aug 9, 202659 minS1

  At 39, Leslie Kenny was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and says she was told she had around five years to live. More than two decades later, she is in long-term remission and has turned that experience into a mission: helping patients become better informed, more involved and more confident in decisions about their own health. In this episode, Leslie Kenny, founder of Oxford Healthspan and co-founder of the Oxford Longevity Project, joins Daphna Stern to tell the story of how she challenged her original prognosis, found intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) through her own research, changed her diet and ultimately reached remission. But her story also raises a much bigger question: where should patient empowerment end and medical expertise begin? The conversation then turns to spermidine, a naturally occurring compound found in the body and in foods that has attracted growing interest for its relationship with autophagy — the cellular recycling process that helps remove and reuse damaged cellular material. Leslie explains why she became convinced of its potential and why she believes natural compounds such as spermidine struggle to attract the research funding available to patentable drugs. Daphna also pushes on the evidence. How much do we actually know about spermidine in humans? What can observational studies tell us — and what can they not? How does the evidence compare with interventions such as rapamycin? And when does an intriguing longevity molecule become something we can genuinely recommend? The conversation expands beyond supplements into a broader discussion about personal responsibility for health, the exposome, the future of preventative medicine and what healthcare could look like if it focused not simply on extending life, but on helping people live well for longer — right through to the end. Guest Bio Leslie Kenny is the founder of Oxford Healthspan and co-founder of the Oxford Longevity Project . Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus at 39 and given a five-year prognosis, Kenny used patient research, dietary overhaul, and an experimental immunoglobulin therapy to reverse her condition into long-term remission. She trained at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and now serves as Global Executive Ambassador for the Japan Autophagy Consortium. Through Oxford Healthspan, she develops food-derived spermidine and nettle-based nutraceuticals, and through the Oxford Longevity Project, she works alongside scientists including Sir Muir Gray, Sir Christopher Ball, Dr Paul Chen, and Emeritus Professor Dennis Noble to advance patient-centred ageing research. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslie-kenny-oxford/ Timestamps * 00:00 — Introduction to Leslie Kenny and her story * 02:10 — IVF, autoimmune disease and the diagnosis that changed everything * 04:30 — Questioning the original diagnosis and discovering a thyroid problem * 08:15 — How patient research led Leslie to intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) * 13:00 — Diet, elimination protocols and visualisation * 17:40 — Reaching remission and turning personal experience into advocacy * 21:50 — How to challenge your doctor without rejecting conventional medicine * 25:30 — What spermidine is and why Leslie became interested in it * 29:15 — Spermidine, the hallmarks of ageing and the comparison with rapamycin * 34:00 — Why natural compounds can struggle for funding, patents and attention * 38:20 — What the human evidence for spermidine actually tells us * 43:10 — The funding problem in independent longevity research * 45:30 — Oxford Healthspan and the Oxford Longevity Project * 48:00 — How much control do we really have over our health and ageing? * 52:00 — Rethinking hospitals, later life and what a good death looks like * 56:30 — Rapid-fire questions * 59:00 — Closing reflections References & Further Reading Kenny, L. — founder, Oxford Healthspan Oxford Longevity Project (co-founded with Sir Muir Gray, Sir Christopher Ball, Dr. Paul Chen, Prof. Dennis Noble) Sears, B. — The Anti-Aging Zone Franceschi, C. — originator of the "inflammaging" concept Partridge, L., Madeo, F., Kennedy, B. — research on spermidine and the hallmarks of ageing Eisenberg, T., et al. — Grazer study on spermidine and human cell telomeres (2021)

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