Sergey Jakimov is the Managing Partner and co-founder of LongeVC, one of Europe's most active longevity-focused venture capital firms, currently raising its second fund targeting $250 million.

In this episode, Chris and Sergey explore the investment landscape shaping longevity biotechnology today. They discuss LongeVC's pragmatic approach to longevity investing—focusing on disease-modifying therapies rather than targeting aging itself—and why this strategy has been successful across their portfolio. Sergey shares insights from major successes including Rubedo's partnership with Beiersdorf and Turn Bio's deal with HanAll, explaining what these deals signal about pharma's evolving interest in longevity approaches. The conversation covers critical topics for researchers and entrepreneurs: common pitfalls in academic spin-offs, the importance of clear regulatory pathways, and how the upcoming patent cliff is creating new opportunities for early-stage biotechs in the longevity space.

Listeners will gain valuable insights into what makes a longevity company investable, how to navigate the transition from academic research to commercial venture, and why solving age-related diseases one by one may ultimately lead to a holistic understanding of aging itself.

The Finer Details:

• Sergey's journey from aspiring neurosurgeon to deep tech entrepreneur to longevity investor
• LongeVC's pragmatic philosophy: targeting specific diseases rather than aging as a whole
• The convergence of biotech, regenerative medicine, and AI in the longevity space
• Key criteria for early-stage investment: disease indication, balanced teams, clean IP transfer
• Why "five scientists in a room" and "great mouse data" don't make an investable company
• The importance of platforms having their own pipelines, not just service models
• How LongeVC's scientific advisory board (including Alex Zhavoronkov, Vadim Gladyshev, Thomas Rando) evaluates investments
• Success stories: Rubedo's senolytic partnership and Turn Bio's epigenetic reprogramming deal
• The changing dynamics between pharma and biotech driven by patent cliffs and urgency to find the "next GLP-1"
• Regulatory strategies: focusing on specific endpoints rather than aging broadly
• Making longevity medicine accessible through disease-focused approaches and data-driven validation
• Personal motivation: Sergey's experience as a rare disease patient and the urgency of advancing treatments

Quotes:

"Longevity as an industry is by far the industry with the biggest added value out there, because that is the issue that we all share. Without solving these things, none of the other stuff really matters—not FinTech, not blockchain, not sustainability."

"Five scientists in a room generally don't make a company. Prolonging rodent lives does not make a company either."

"The ultimate longevity drug version 1.0 would be a therapeutic which has an original disease indication, which also has somehow cracked the mechanism of action that would be translatable across several age-related disease domains."

"It is extremely arrogant for the space to say that we're not interested in age-related diseases, like we're not interested in curing the diseases. That's traditional biotech. We're not that. We are the longevity space."

"Pharma is still thinking in terms of assets rather than processes. It is almost impossible to sell a process to them... What pharma still wants is the result of that capacity actually coming to life."

"At the point when something has happened to you and a rare disease has happened to you... you're only equipped with that standard of treatment that is currently available and that has made it to the clinic."

"I think the presence of the FDA as this kind of gatekeeper-type agency saying, 'No, you cannot go after aging in a...

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