In this special episode, host Chris Patil (VP-Media, BioAge) moderates a live panel discussion at the 25th Bay Area Aging Meeting at UCSF, bringing together six leading voices across the aging research ecosystem to tackle one of the field's most critical challenges: how to move promising discoveries from the laboratory to therapies that can benefit patients.

The distinguished panel spans academia, industry, and scientific publishing, featuring Janine Sengstack (CEO, Junevity), Saul Villeda (Professor, UCSF), Jodi Nunnari (Director, Bay Area Institute of Science, Altos Labs), Sebastien Thuault (Chief Editor, Nature Aging), Anne Brunet (Professor, Stanford), and Nir Barzilai (Professor, Albert Einstein College of Medicine). Together, they explore the most promising research directions for clinical impact, the revolutionary tools enabling modern aging research, and the structural challenges that must be overcome to bring longevity therapies to market.

Listeners will gain insights into the emerging science of cellular rejuvenation, the importance of systemic factors in aging, how to balance high-risk discovery with practical drug development, and the cultural shifts needed to better prepare the next generation of scientists for translational work. The panel also addresses the regulatory challenges of targeting aging itself as an indication and offers candid advice for young researchers navigating this rapidly evolving field.

The Finer Details:

• Emerging research directions with the greatest clinical potential: cellular senescence, rejuvenation and repair, DNA methylation clocks, and understanding what makes aging biomarkers tick
• The revolution in cellular and spatial resolution tools and how single-cell technologies are revealing cell-type-specific aging responses
• Systemic factors and the remarkable plasticity remaining in aging organisms that can be unlocked through interventions
• The critical importance of starting with human data and working backward to validate targets and approaches
• Challenges unique to aging biotech: the need for aging-specific cellular assays, testing in older animal models, and genetic validation
• Cultural and structural barriers between academia and industry, including the shift from mechanism-focused to mission-driven research
• Balancing high-risk fundamental discovery with the practical needs of drug development and clinical translation
• The regulatory landscape for aging interventions and potential pathways to FDA approval beyond traditional disease indications
• Advice for young scientists: embracing rejection as part of the process, finding passion, working as teams, and considering diverse career paths in the growing longevity ecosystem

Quotes:

"Our goal as a company is to increase human health span, and the way I like to frame that more colloquially is we want to increase the number of happy, healthy years each person gets to spend on Earth." - Janine Sengstack

"There is an exquisite amount of plasticity left in an aging organism, both within the tissues, within the cells. There is plasticity that we can actually tap into." - Saul Villeda

"Burn bright, but don't burn out." - Jodi Nunnari

"The challenge that we run into is that there are so many combinations that very quickly it would become intractable to line up enough test tubes to test them all." - Sebastien Thuault, on the complexity of aging interventions

"We love our job. If not, we would not be doing it. I would do it again in a heartbeat... you get paid to play, to ask the questions that interest you, the approaches that interest you to play with who you want to—it is a fantastic job." - Saul Villeda

"Our life is a life of rejection...and still, we're having fun and making an advance. So don't give up." - Nir Barzilai

Michael Ringel is the Chief Operating Officer of Life Biosciences, a biotechnology company pioneering cellular rejuvenation therapies to reverse and prevent multiple diseases of aging. Michael became COO of Life just a few months ago, but he's been advising the company since 2018. Prior to this year, he was managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where over a 25-year career he focused on R&D and innovation initiatives across the private sector and government. He earned his PhD in biology at Imperial College London and a JD from Harvard Law, and has become an active and highly respected member of the global longevity biotech community.

In this episode, Chris and Michael explore Life Biosciences' groundbreaking approach to partial epigenetic reprogramming - the "holy grail" technology that could transform how we age at cellular, tissue, and organism levels. They discuss how this approach taps into the same biology that makes babies young, Life's lead therapeutic candidate ER-100 for eye diseases, and the "pipeline in a pill" concept at the core of the geroscience hypothesis: the idea that enable single interventions based on longevity science could treat multiple age-related diseases simultaneously.

The Finer Details:

• The biology behind partial epigenetic reprogramming and how it differs from full reprogramming to pluripotency
• Why Michael considers partial reprogramming the "holy grail" of longevity interventions
• Life Biosciences' lead candidate ER-100 for glaucoma and NAION (non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy)
• The innovative inducible system that allows the therapy to be turned on and off with doxycycline
• Why the eye represents an ideal starting point for reprogramming therapies
• The "pipeline in a pill" concept and geroscience hypothesis - how single interventions could treat multiple age-related diseases
• Parallels between the emerging longevity field and the massive GLP-1 drug market that many pharma companies missed
• The role of philanthropic investment in advancing fundamental longevity research
• Evolutionary theories of aging and why aging should be easily manipulable
• Timeline expectations for moving from single disease treatments to whole-body rejuvenation

Links

• Life Biosciences company website
• Michael Ringel's ARDD talk

Dr. Janine Sengstack is the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Junevity, a company created in 2023 with the mission of extending health span and lifespan through what they term "Cell Reset therapeutics." The company recently secured $10 million in seed funding.

In this episode, Chris and Janine explore the innovative platform Janine developed during her PhD work in Hao Li's lab at UCSF, which now forms the foundation of Junevity's therapeutic approach. They discuss how the company uses computational and experimental methods to identify transcription factors that can "reset" cells from a diseased, aged state back to a healthy state while maintaining cell identity. Janine explains how Junevity is developing siRNA therapeutics targeting these transcription factors to treat age-related diseases, with a focus on metabolic conditions and other disorders that impact longevity.

The Finer Details:

• The development of the Reset platform during Janine's PhD work and its evolution into Junevity's therapeutic approach
• How transcription factors act as "managers" in cells, regulating many other genes
• Using AI and machine learning to identify the right transcription factors to target based on disease and tissue-specific data
• The validation process for siRNA therapeutic candidates in cell and animal models
• Junevity's focus on diseases with large-scale transcriptional dysregulation, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, muscle wasting diseases, and osteoarthritis
• The advantages of siRNA as a therapeutic modality for targeting traditionally "undruggable" transcription factors
• Junevity's business strategy and timeline, with clinical trials potentially beginning in 2026

Quotes:

"We tackled this high risk, high reward PhD project: we were inspired by the Yamanaka factors to say, 'Okay, let's find brand new transcription factors that we can target to take cells from a diseased, old state and bring them back to a healthy state while keeping them the same cell type, never turning them into a stem cell.'"

"Transcription factors: I like to think of them as managers in the cell."

"We think the advent of modern AI and machine learning tools to better analyze what they regulate, plus siRNA as a really well-proven therapeutic modality, really unlocks the ability to target transcription factors and really make powerful therapeutics with them."

"We're thinking about using transcriptional regulation as a way to come up with novel therapeutics to treat diseases that have a big impact on people's health span and lifespan."

"We want to advance our programs towards development candidates, which basically means the drug entity, and move them forward towards clinical development as fast as possible."

"I would love if we had multiple siRNA drugs on the market, ideally, or in late stages of development for a wide range of longevity-related diseases... We think that there's really huge potential here for making a big impact on a lot of different really complicated diseases."

Links

https://www.junevity.com