For a new company working to help expand life spans, it’s growing up quickly.
After officially launching this July, Deep Longevity—a spinout venture from prolific artificial intelligence molecule designer Insilico Medicine—has found a new owner in Hong Kong investment firm Regent Pacific.
With its focus on developing AI programs for research, Deep Longevity has been working to develop highly accurate, cell-based biomarkers for aging—dubbed “deep aging clocks”—in collaboration with genomics-focused Human Longevity.
Going forward, Regent Pacific plans to have the company develop a large, integrated platform for biotechs focused on the pursuit of longer lives. The firm has agreed to pay HK$29.56 million, or about $3.8 million U.S., for its efforts.
Deep Longevity’s cellular aging clocks aim to provide more information about a person than just the number of their trips around the sun. Its AI systems track changes at the molecular level up through tissues and organs, while also considering physiological and psychological developments, to create a series of universal biomarkers that provide a truer picture of someone’s age.
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“By becoming part of Regent Pacific, we are planning to help it transform into the first public company to become the engine for the emerging longevity ecosystem and help everyone on the planet live longer and better regardless of their nationality, race, gender or social status,” said Insilico chief Alex Zhavoronkov, who also serves as founder and CEO of Deep Longevity.
“As part of Regent Pacific, we aim to service the longevity biotechnology industry as well as the health and life insurance industries and become the ultimate instrument to hedge the longevity risk,” Zhavoronkov said.
Additionally, deep aging clocks and its AI tools can be explored as a tool to predict a person’s response to COVID-19, according to the company, as the novel coronavirus has disproportionately affected the elderly.
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Deep Longevity came out of stealth earlier this summer with a series A financing round of an undisclosed amount, backed by ETP Ventures and the Human Longevity and Performance Impact Venture Fund, BOLD Capital Partners, Longevity Vision Fund and Oculus co-founder and former chief software architect Michael Antonov, through Formic Ventures and LongeVC.
Going forward, Deep Longevity will be run by Jim Mellon—nonexecutive chairman of Regent Pacific, and chairman of the anti-aging biotech startup Juvenescence—along with Zhavoronkov and Wei-Wu He, chairman of Human Longevity.
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"Our long-term vision is to transform Regent Pacific into a global end-to-end longevity and wellness biotechnology company dedicated to extending healthy productive lives of billions of people worldwide by developing a longevity ecosystem,” CEO Jamie Gibson said.
“It is only logical to start executing on this vision via the acquisition of the most sophisticated AI system designed to track the rate of human aging and evaluate the effectiveness of longevity interventions.”