The Regenerative Health Podcast from TheRHA.org

Anti Aging and Enhancing Longevity - 2025 BioTech Showcase Expert Panel

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Welcome to a special edition of The Regenerative Health Association Podcast, recorded live at the 2025 Biotech Showcase in San Francisco. This year's conference, a cornerstone event in the life sciences industry, brought together over 3,200 global biotech and health leaders to discuss cutting-edge innovations in healthcare.Our podcast features an exceptional panel on "Enhancing Longevity," moderated by Professor Gordon Lithgow from the prestigious Buck Institute. The panel includes:

Notable facts:

  • Juvena Therapeutics has raised nearly $50M and is advancing a novel biologic for myotonic dystrophy type 1
    31.
  • eGenesis recently achieved a milestone with a successful pig kidney transplant in a human patient
    37.
  • Rubedo Life Sciences is developing first-in-class small molecules to target senescent cells
    7.
  • The Buck Institute, represented by Professor Lithgow, is the world's first research institution devoted solely to research on aging
    43.

Join us for this illuminating discussion on the future of longevity science and its potential to transform healthcare for our aging global population.

If you'd like to learn more about stem cells and regenerative health, please visit The Regenerative Health Association at: www.therha.org.

It's the world's first and largest community for regenerative health consumers with a wealth of information and resources for you.

Unknown Speaker  00:00
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Just want to welcome our panel. First of all, starting with Analy Yousef, CEO, founder of juvena therapeutics, Marcus costena, CEO of COVID.

Unknown Speaker  00:14
And we have Michael Curtis, President, CEO of E Genesis, and Frederick Bedingfield, CEO and director of federal lifestyle.

Unknown Speaker  00:30
Thank you so so welcome. Thanks for doing this today. I want to start off with a very, very simple question, which each of you really think about a yes or no answer to is the next trillion dollar biotech company going to be a longevity company, I would say it's definitely a possibility, right? Yeah, I would agree.

Unknown Speaker  00:57
Yes, possible. Okay, absolutely. Wow. We're off to a great start. Let me

Unknown Speaker  01:03
just check the temperature of the room here. How many people in the room are already in the long guarantee space in some way, either in a company or an investor or looking to be an investor? Okay, so we have many believers in the house. Okay, so then I have a question, and maybe we'll start at the other end with Maddie. So longevity is going to this huge thing. The commercialization of the biology region is going to be a huge commercial success. What's longevity? That's a great question.

Unknown Speaker  01:41
I believe that longevity is the duration by which you can live life disease free, as well as just even in a very literal sense of longevity, the age at which you cease to to have a beating heart. Well, okay, and maybe now take this opportunity to strike describe your company for a minute or so and just see how that fits with your definition of longevity. Yeah, sure. So at juvenile therapeutics, we are, in many ways, a regenerative medicine company that's discovering and developing biologics that are tissue restorative in nature for chronic age related diseases, with a currently a laser focus on muscle wasting and metabolic diseases. And we're doing this through a unique AI driven platform that enables us to mine protein secreted by stem cells in order to identify signaling proteins that can target mechanisms underlying aging biology to restore tissue homeostasis and promote, ultimately, the restoration of function. Thank you, Marcus, same question to you. Bucha, again. So I think there are a few things we know for sure, and then there are ambitions. I think what we know is that across most societies, most of us tend to live long, right? We also know that if an ultimate decade or decades are written by multiple different diseases, in many cases, unfortunately, and I think the way we often use this health span, I think, along the lines of what you also described, is that as we grow older, there is innovation for people concerned, but also society, that we find novel ways of aging, healthy extending healthy years in line with that growing project. I think that's the ambition. That's part of the question. And your company, clock bio, then you suggest you're right into this area, so definitely working on time, yeah. So tell us a bit more about the company, how it fits. So we as more bio based in Cambridge, UK, what our ambition is to find novel therapeutic pathways to treating age related disease such that we can actually extend health span in line with chronic longevity. How we do that? It's all grounded very much deeply in science, in our case, in stem cell science. So as all of you people will know, as we grow older, our somatic cells grow sick. Have multiple different errors, hallmarks of aging, cellular hallmarks of aging. That's called literature, and we found a way to work with stem cells that would usually not age and stay healthy. In our case, IPSC, use pluripotent stem cells and force these stem cells to age. So we have stem cells that are old and sick, just like an old and sick somatic cell and the beauty of that is that's our proprietary intervention that that triggers spontaneous reversement age. So we have a novel form of human biology that IPSC, which wouldn't age naturally, want to be forced into age such that they faithfully recreate the cellular hallmarks of aging, then spontaneously self rejuvenate. And with a genome wide Christmas screen, we've decoded how they do that identified, plus 150 genes that are regulators of that rejuvenation, and now our quest is to make that therapeutically translatable to the human organs. That's what we do, in a nutshell. Okay, who's your company based? By the way, our company is based in Redwood City, California, okay, about 30 minutes or so away from here? Michael, so, yes, so in the context of our technology, which I'll describe in a second, we think about longevity as avoiding mortality, but then maintaining a high quality of life. And you know, our technology, we come to longevity as the future vision for organ replacement. Our initial goal is to solve the organ shortage problem, avoid the wait list, and get patients that could benefit from an organ transplant, on transplant, and the technology that we've developed is our transgenic porcine donors. We have the most advanced genoengineering platform in the world. Our clinical donor has over 60 edits to the porcine genome, and we're the only group that addresses all three challenges with cross species transplantation, those being potential for zoonotic transmission, hypercute rejection and then long term graft function. This past March, we did the first ever course on transgenic course on kidney transplant, the living person with Mr. Slamin kidney function for 51 days. We just in December, got approval from the FDA for a three patient trial that will start this month at Mass General, again in kidney so the near term goal is to solve or treat patients who are suffering end stage organ disease right now, but in the context of longevity, eventually, more most organs fail. Right Heart disease, kidney disease, in some ways, is a disease of aging, and if we can't avoid the progression to the loss of kidney function, eventually you will need to replace your kidneys. When you replace kidneys when you replace your your heart, and this is kind of how we see the future of cross species transplant. He touched on the theme, I think we'll come back to this idea of prevention versus replacement or regeneration. So Frederick tell us about what longevity is, yeah. So I think longevity is really refers to how long we live. But as everybody here has alluded to, we're not really interested in just prolonging the years. We want to prolong healthy life. So I guess longevity science is really looking to treat or prevent the conditions, the biological processes that lead to premature morbidity, mortality and loss of function. And so at verbatim, which is quite a clinical stage, biotech company out of Sunnyvale, California. Our founder was a Stanford professor. We have an AI enabled program, and we are focused on cellular regeneration, combining traditional AI approaches to drug discovery with single cell RNA sequencing, biological tissue evaluation, and our lead drug is just announced. Actually, the target is that you get for modulator, for synonymic effect in tissue, and we're starting in the skin. Thank you. Thank you. So the one there's a parallel session going on, by the way, don't rush out right now on Alzheimer's disease. And I think even in the title, it mentions that the general failure in our ability to make any progress on what is essentially a flagship disease of aging, degenerative disease. So with the billions of dollars that's already been invested into therapies for Alzheimer's, the question arises, I think, is there something different that we're doing now that's, that's that's distinct from the approaches I've gone before with, with mainly Big Pharma, but other other organizations as well. Are we thinking about aging? Are we thinking about diseases of aging in a different way? Sure. I mean, I'll start by actually, my postdoc in the lab of Professor Tony West Cray at Stanford, where, you know, we really were looking at neurodegenerative diseases from the lens of mechanisms underlying brain aging or aging itself, and things like increase in chronic, systemic or localized neuro inflammation, the decline of our own neural stem cell function and ability to regenerate and repair and create new neurons, this in itself, or like activation of microglia, you know, astrocyte reactivity, protein aggregation that occurs these, in and of itself, mechanisms underlying just aging, and this dysregulation of critical protein signaling pathways manifests oftentimes as neurodegenerative diseases and diseases that can cause dementia. And so if we can target many of these pathways to enhance brain health and to rejuvenate brain function, that could be a really potent mechanism in the way in which we can treat diseases such as Alzheimer's. So I really think it's targeting it from the lens of just looking at the natural biology of aging, which, in and of itself is what's causing the decline in tissue function and then the manifestation in the form of chronic diseases, most which have no cure today. I mean, can I do agree with you that the failure to look at the aging component many age related diseases is quite stunning, really, that there are still many brilliant scientists who will say that Alzheimer's is not necessarily an aging disease, which I think quite credible. Yeah. So I guess bringing it down to empirically, and then what we see in the market empirically, with the data we've generated, so the genes that regulate rejuvenation IPCs, what we call the atlas of rejuvenation factors, we've obviously started very strictly to dig into what's in. And if you look at those genes and map them to the literature and understand the pathways that they're part of, two elements really come to the forefront. One, very much neurodegeneration and neurodegeneration related pathways that our genes are part of, and then another aggregation around skin fibroblasts. And work that could be done with other hypotheses that we only starting to understand, but it's definitely something that comes to the fore in a very balanced, unbiased, data driven approach that seems to be very much at the core, then coming cycle back to the market. And I think that's something that's evolved over the last years. We've obviously had dozens of conversations with respect to partners and investors and people interested in our work. And the question of viewer generation is usually the one on tip of everyone's tongue that comes up very fast. And I think one of the things we also see in conversations here at jpm is that people are more and more interested in also, kind of understanding that, or looking into aging as the most associated risk factor with, for example, for example, Alzheimer's disease. And so I think that's bringing those two fields very much together. Yeah. I think when we think about longitudinal progression of disease in the context of organ transplant, the question is, when do you intervene, right? So in case of Alzheimer's, unless you have a genetic disorder that we can see coming, like when we start treating and then those trials become really long, and how do you shortcut that? You see this even in organ transplant, we just take densities, kidney failure, for instance, kidney failure. For instance, we know patients that are suffering from end case kidney failure for years, they're slowly progressing, getting worse. At some point, we make the decision that the kidneys are not functioning enough. We put them on dialysis, and then they go through that for a few years, and then we finally get around to maybe putting them on a transplant wait list, which then only about a third of patients ever getting transplant, but we know we can transplant those patients preemptively, their outcomes are going to be much better, right? Patients that get fresh kidneys as soon as their whole kidneys die have much better cardiovascular outcomes. So for us, and then we're going to replace them in a field, it's preemptive. Transplant is probably where we're headed. Of course, that's not where we're going to start, but as you start to see the decline, unless there are approaches that can stave off end stage kidney failure, once you start down the road, you might as well change about right? That's kind of the idea. You think we're doing something different? Yes, and no, I think, I think our tools are getting better. But that's not specific to longevity science. That's that's across biotech and medicine. We're certainly getting better tools, and at the end of the day, I think, you know, we are, we have to currently be focused on treating diseases, because that's the way the FDA is going to have a conversation. You know, you can't go to them and say, let's talk about longevity indication. Maybe we'll get there. They're getting there with animals, perhaps, but they're not there yet, so we're gonna have to talk about diseases. But the fascinating thing about all this is that we're finding these common pathways that, call it aging pathways, that are affecting all types of organ tissues. You see it when person ages. They don't just get a singular condition, muscle wasting. You see their heart failing, their brain

Unknown Speaker  13:32
failing, metabolic syndrome, cancer. You know, all the things that kill us and prevent us from living a healthy life, and those common pathways, whether it's synonymic therapies that you can intervene in epigenetic reprogramming your stem cells, those are some of the fascinating things. Now we're starting in skin, but our ambitions are to have systemic therapies to treat neurodegeneration and to treat metabolic diseases. Skin is a great place to start safe. It's accessible, accessible, and you see it with alters, labs and turn bio and others as well. They're starting, and scan is a good place to start. But longer term, these processes are affecting all of our problems. Okay, so you're touching on something I really wanted to get into, which is this idea of aging as a common cause of multiple diseases. I guess it throws up some challenges. So we can talk about regulatory stuff in that in a few minutes, perhaps. But just thinking about that from the biology, well, first of all, do you really believe that is your is the sort of the DNA of your company is based around this idea of the aging affects multiple diseases, and if so, then is there a challenge there in a sort of regenerative or replacement approach, where you're fixing one thing, but you're not necessarily fixing the underlying aging causes driving pathologies? So sorry, that's a rambling question, but please jump in, I can maybe start. I think that one of the most exciting things about looking at systemic changes in protein sibling mechanisms of aging is that we can develop therapies that, when systemically administered, can not only target one particular disease or tissue target, but ultimately multiple. So the case is juvenile, where our lead asset is an HSA IGF, two fusion protein, and in many ways, it's an endocrine therapy. We like to call it the insulin of muscle, where it's going to be subcutaneously administered, Id weekly, or maybe bi monthly dosing, we're actually going to be entering the clinic a little later this year, and while we're primarily targeting as a first indication, muscle wasting, looking at a dystrophy aware diseases are sort of packed to POC into the clinic before going into sarcopenia with myotonic dystrophy, what we notice In our animal models is that we're seeing, you know, multiple hallmarks of rejuvenation in the body from administration of this endocrine therapy. And so, you know, I believe that's one of the most exciting things we'll often get. You know, pharma or folks that were in discussions would ask us, are there off target effects? Are you worried about that? And while we, of course, will look at the safety profile of, you know, off target effects based on receptor distribution, we're actually seeing that it's it's not that it's actually a good thing, and it's really, actually hard to kind of educate, especially folks in like traditional pharma companies, that, you know, it's actually an attractive thing to have a therapy that's systemically administered, that can potentially have the ability to, you know, rejuvenate multiple organs at the same time. And I do think that that's kind of going to be the way that these therapies go if they're systemically administered. Super exciting. Well, so I guess what we definitely know and see every day, and what it will suggest is that aging very much correlates with all these different diseases, right? That correlation doesn't necessarily give you the position, but the way we try and understand it, the way we try and tackle it, is that it exists in literature, that it happens level. Obviously, it manifests itself through more of aging. And if we can address one of them, is fantastic. If you perhaps find a page address several different parallel we could think and venture into a world of actually, you know, preventative care and keeping cells healthy, and then that might address the thing itself, right? I guess the reality also is, based on your research, you might be best placed to kind of answer your own question here, but that's how we see it. And so I think we are very much open to looking into different repurposing approaches and ways to potentially tackle several hallmarks of violence and really think about safe drugs that could work for healthy people who want to stay healthy. But at the same time, if you identify different genes that could be relevant for specific hallmarks of age, it will be a tremendous race to not try go after that in the right setup, even if it's quote, unquote, in the existing regulatory pathways. Michael, I mean, you talked about delays in transplantation, and the downsides of that is that aging itself that's going on, is that the increasing challenge in that? Or is it, or is it the sort of local pathology just getting I think it's both. I mean, you definitely see an age relationship to, for instance, loss of kidney function. If you have a perfectly healthy person, give them long enough, and eventually their kidneys are found. I think you can say the same thing about heart long enough, something's happening for the degradation of the kidney, something's happening for the degradation of the heart tissue, just based on the age, right? So if you really extract for a second, like aging is a disease itself, because it ends in mortality, right? If, definition, all these diseases are trying to cure, are trying to cure the improved quality of life and avoid mortality, well, that's aging at a very high level, right? And so are there central mechanisms, and this is way beyond what they think we're doing Genesis to avoid that progression, which will happen you do everything perfectly, you will die, right? And it will likely be due to some organ failure, right? It could be cardiovascular, it could be metabolic, neuro, that central mechanism, I think, still loses. But what actually? Why are all these tissues progressively declining over time? So, Frederick, you kicked us off with this idea of you start with the skin, but you've got ambitions beyond that. How does that work as a company? How do you is that a reinvention of the company? Is that is a spin off, a different company, together on the new education area or the or do you think we're getting to a point where single companies can really take on multiple, multiple education areas and be successful across the board? Yeah, well, you know, we have a platform. So we are definitely not interested in being a one trick pony. We're starting with the skin, the same exact compound. We're developing a systemic formulation We're in. We're in this first instance. We're looking at senescence and senolytic therapy. So it's it's much easier to localize similar therapy, because you don't have to worry so much about off target effects. Once you go towards systemic therapy, you've got to have more precise selectivity. And so you start thinking about, how do we deliver this drug to the cells of interest in the organs of interest, pro drugs or ABCs in that sense, it's not that different than oncology, in a way, but I see it just as part of the same spectrum of drug development for us, it's a molecule that's clearly active in a lot of tissues, very important role in senescence. And we're going to develop topical, systemic formulations, maybe even local injectable things like anyone have different opinion data, but strategically as a company, how you move from one application area to many? So I think the way we see it is that you need to know what your strengths are and see where you need partnerships. And you know, see it very unbiased, as in different partnerships can work for different forms of assets, and I would agree that, for example, is something that could has a lower barrier to entry, it's safer, and it's something that you can do more of your own, if you as a platform company, which we are as well, I think what's important for us is that we face dual pressures. On the one hand, we need to show that our platform works and it generates data that's that's clinically pre clinically relevant. Equally, you don't want to fall down the trap, but you only focusing one thing in abandon the wealth of data and everything else. And so we we need to push very fast, but we can push as a scientific, fast moving small company, and then need to know where we would be well advised to have therapeutic partners and something that might be bigger, and where there is expertise that we lack in house, and I think that's how we want to

Unknown Speaker  21:46
tackle it. Any other comment on that? Oh, yeah. So at juvenile, we also have a platform that, in many ways, is therapy agnostic, while we're now laser focused and really the success of our first asset. What's really exciting about what we've done 161 is that it's a pipeline and a product with broad applicability across myopathies and dystrophies. So we're taking a few approaches to try to leverage our platform, and the fact that we've now identified over 55 heads across six organ systems that are disease modifying in nature and have the potential to be therapeutic translated. If we had a billion dollars, we'd be happy to do it all ourselves, but we don't have that. And there's, of course, the financial and capital constraints and notion that if you can get your first drug to be successful, then it opens so many doors to your next set of drugs. So what we're also doing is just, and we have multiple confidential discussions going with several pharma companies that I've really just with this, you know, advent of the ozempics, and, you know, we go these of the world now, and the fact that they're actually realizing that it's incredibly lucrative to really treat diseases associated with aging, or unhealthy aging, and there's huge markets. We're actually seeing this increase in interest from a lot of larger pharma companies to leverage this approach for other chronic indications, to really target the biology of aging. And so we're working to close, hopefully, one, if not more, partnerships that will enable us to really leverage the platform and then work with these large firm of companies that do have the capital, the manufacturing capabilities, the clinical translation capabilities to help us bring many of our novel targets and assets to market for some of the biggest indications out there, I think for us, is finding indications that you can show very quickly in a relatively short amount of time on venture Capital, that you can make a difference for a patient. This initial focus on disease with a long mutual longevity, I think makes a lot of sense. We focus on, for instance, liver perfusion to treat patients and acute liver failure, mortality in those patients is about 50% in three days. Patients are nearing death, and the ideas bring back through the brink of death, if you look at something like the GLP ones, which show very in reality, acute effects on weight loss, which then are now materializing as a long term benefits overall, right? I think that's a beautiful, beautiful playbook, right? They had very strong biology, very clear early signals, and now have been playing out to be massive. And I think it's always challenging for any company to find those early, acute indications that you can show biology shows something meaningful. But if you can do that, you have a shot of building the long vision. I think if you can't do that, it's gonna be super cheap, especially in this financing environment, to build anything long term we give So this raises, I guess, sort of regulatory issues and also investment issues. And do you, do you have to play very much a straight arrow, where your single education area, this is the data for this. Do you show your hand in any way at all that you're a longevity company? Is that? Is that, in an approach, in a pitch deck or discussion with the FDA, are people excited by that longer view, or is it something you keep very quiet and speak for us, this is the first time we've ever talked about longevity.

Unknown Speaker  25:12
From our experience, it's very semantic. Some people talk about longevity, some people talk about health span. I think what people respond to is data and a science movement approach, where we can particularly of why relevant. And then it's really about the different areas of priority, neurodegeneration, skincare, and then other ideas we have we have in the background. And I think that's what people respond to almost no matter which label we put up. Yeah, and I'd say that I really have seen an evolution happen over the last, you know, seven, eight years since, seven years since we launched juvenile right at the beginning, it was really kind of taboo to say anything about we're targeting the biology of aging or longevity or even health span, but now it's kind of gotten a little bit more into the mainstream, and I think that really is the shift that's happened in the last couple years, With the focus and the success of therapeutics for obesity, where now, because Pharma is now more interested in aging, biology and longevity, that's just made it more acceptable to kind of use those labels, although I would say that juvenile, we never really call ourselves a longevity company, but I will often say that we're targeting diseases associated with aging, and we're really targeting the biology of the aging to develop tissues for hip biologics. Great. Thank you, Frederick, if you don't mind, can

Unknown Speaker  26:28
you talk about the headwinds or the challenges, either, as you see, for companies like yourself, or your specific of the senolytics and senescence as a target? Yeah, I think just in general, in the space, probably the biggest challenge is thinking through the regulatory strategy, and that's why I think everybody's focused on a specific disease right now. But the fact is, most of us involved in this arena are fascinated by the biology of aging and and we have a mission to actually do something broader than just treat a single disease. And I think that's why these metabolic diseases have been so impressive. You know, you treat the GLP one, you have all kinds of impact on patient and on morbidity, mortality, diseases we may not have even initially thought were related to metabolism, dementia and cancer. We're

Unknown Speaker  27:32
understanding it better because of the science, but I think for us, it's important to stay passionate about that machine, and we are interested in tackling aging, maybe, maybe longevity isn't the best word, because that just makes people think you want to just live longer, but the biology of ages is understanding it and preventing premature morbidity, premature loss of function. Music to my ears, headwinds and bottlenecks. Yeah. So we've been around about eight years and been through several we just raised a series D this past fall, and up until the D, it was all about clinical translation. So when we first started the company, we were a CRISPR, genome engineering company. Around the time when CRISPR was hot, everyone cared about CRISPR, and then suddenly everyone's like, who cares about CRISPR anymore? So stop

Unknown Speaker  28:26
throwing yourself. And what

Unknown Speaker  28:30
we've seen for the past 1224, months, everyone's focused on critical data, right? And so what was the catalyst for us was, was a lot of investors looking at us thinking, you know, the FDA is FDA everywhere this happened. Are you ever going to get into patients? Are you ever going to treat anyone and even treating the first patient? And when Mr. Statement went home, they 16 post transplant. It changed everything, because it showed that one FDA was open to doing it. We could have reasonably good outcomes right out of the gate. And now we're set up to start this three patient trial this month. So I think the clinical translation and clarity into how soon you can get to the clinic credibly is right now. I mean, always has been, but more so now than ever, super important to fighting those headlines if you have a path of pushing three years from the clinic. I mean, good luck, right? I mean, I just don't see it. But in 2021, 2020, 2019 you could finance those companies. And now it's really hard. It's being done, but very rare. So I think that the path to clinical translation and proximity to clinical translation, even if it's kind of odd or extreme or maybe not, the ultimate goal that gets you into clinics soon, to me, would be a really important role. Marcus, where do you think you are not on that such trajectory? Plane sailing, from now.

Unknown Speaker  29:52
Plane sailing would be the lunar right, but that's, I mean, that's in the nature of every frontier and everything you want to build. Clearly, there's, you know, there are elements to the macro environment that we can particularly powerful research projects at the moment. Equally experience would be that people respond to substantially respond to data and nothing's sort of transparent. You did you can show what you're talking about. I think that's one of the risks of every very sector that's early in the type cycle and clearly the majority helps spend is in that kind of beginning of that hype cycle that you don't just overpromise. Everything's going to be different in like two years, one year, whatever. I've seen in other sectors. And I think that's that's just something to be aware of. It's exciting that can make it sexy very fast but you need to.

Unknown Speaker  30:15
Hype cycle. And clearly, longevity, health spend, is in that kind of beginning in that hype cycle that you don't just over promise everything's going to be different in like, two years, one year, whatever. I've seen that in other sectors, and I think that's that's just something to be aware of. It's exciting that can make it sexy very fast, but you need to kind of make sure that what you say is kind of, you know, you can catch the check with your data. And I think that's important. And then, of course, yeah, the pressure is to be pre clinical and clinical as fast as possible. And I think cycling back to the earlier discussion that we've had, that just also means that you need to be clear on the risk return profile of each of your opportunities. Perhaps start with the ones that could be faster. We've talked about skincare. There are other options as well, while you keep on building on the other things in the background, perhaps inappropriate you know partnerships and relationships. And I think that's how we think about it that makes it confidence that you know it will never be smooth sailing and it shouldn't be because you know it's a frontier, but it's feasible.


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