As a non-profit organization, our goal is to engage and educate the public about the potential of rejuvenation and a world in which age-related diseases are a thing of the past. With that in mind, this is the ideal opportunity to tell you about some of the exciting things that we have done recently and about some of our future plans to support our goal.
Speaking at conferences advocating for longer, healthy lives
We have been very active lately at various conferences and events, sharing our vision of a future without aging:
- Longevity Summer Camp
- Aging Research and Drug Discovery 2022
- Longevity Investors Conference
- Ending Age-Related Diseases 2022
- Longevity Summit Dublin
- Rejuvenation Startup Summit
Longevity Summer Camp
Organized by LessDeath.org, the Longevity Summer Camp was a retreat-style inaugural event in July 2022 that focused on introducing young talent to the possibility of pivoting their careers and professional focus into the longevity biotech space. Stephanie Dainow, our new Executive Director, was at the event as a speaker, panelist and advisor.
This event is the ideal place to meet like-minded people, especially if you are interested in starting or advancing a career in longevity technology development. There will be another camp happening next year, so if you missed out this time, consider going in 2023.
Aging Research and Drug Discovery 2022
The 9th Aging Research and Drug Discovery conference happened at the end of August in Copenhagen. The event saw many experts and thought leaders from pharma and biotech companies working on aging come together.
We at Lifespan.io were pleased to be an official media partner to the conference, and Stephanie was the moderator for the emerging tech panel, which explored DeSci blockchain funding technology.
Longevity Investors Conference
We were an official media partner for the Longevity Investors Conference, which took place in Gstaad in Switzerland recently. This event focused mainly on investment and the business of biotech. Stephanie was there representing Lifespan.io and was the moderator for the Bridging business and Academia panel at the event.
Ending Age-Related Diseases 2022
On August 11-14, 2022, we held our fifth annual conference, Ending Age-Related Diseases 2022. The virtual event saw people gather to listen to the latest developments in the field from the leaders of rejuvenation biotechnology research and investment. We will be releasing more videos from the conference over the coming months.
We will be back in 2023, and our event will be returning to its traditional physical venue in New York City. If you would like to stay informed about the next conference and special offers on tickets, then register and tick the newsletter box.
Longevity Summit Dublin
The inaugural event of the Longevity Summit Dublin has recently finished. This new annual conference series has already established itself as an important event on the aging research calendar, and we were delighted to be a media partner this year.
Stephanie Dainow was at the event and gave a talk exploring how our organization works to connect various people working in different areas of our field and how that promotes our shared goal of increasing healthy human lifespan.
We were also delighted to learn that Stephanie was presented with the 2022 Rising Star Award by the Mayor of Dublin, Alison Gilliland, at the conference. This award was given in recognition of her contribution to the field.
Congratulations to Stephanie for all her hard work in the longevity space and for everything she is doing at Lifespan.io. Thanks to her, Lifespan.io continues to be the market leader in longevity and aging research news, education, advocacy and crowdfunding.
Arkadi Mazin, one of our journalists, also wrote a report on the Longevity Summit Dublin. Check that out to get an idea of what is happening and the interesting things going on in the field.
Lifespan.io contributes to new book by Jay Olshansky
In 2015, James Kirkland, George Martin and Jay Olshansky edited a volume with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press entitled “Aging: The Longevity Dividend”, in which they summarized the advances in aging research and the prospects for extending healthy human lives.
Jay Olshansky has been busy writing a new book which includes a chapter written by our President, Keith Comito. This is a follow-up to the 2015 book, is entitled “Geroscience: A New Frontier in Public Health”, and is due to be published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press this year or in early 2023.
This new volume aims to place geroscience as a major public health initiative and quite rightly so. Interventions against aging, and thus age-related diseases, have the potential to be truly game changing in the context of health and longevity. The book will explore the advances in aging research that have happened recently and the emerging research pathways of the near future.
As a taste of what to expect from the book, Cold Spring Harbor has made the chapter written by Keith available to enjoy ahead of print. If you would like to learn about crowdfunding and crowdsourcing of aging science, check it out!
Website improvements and knowledge hubs
We also have plans to overhaul our website and give it an improved look and style. As part of this, we are continuing to develop our knowledge hubs, curated content areas for different interest groups, on the site.
- Lifestyle – Articles and topics about diet, exercise, and lifestyle
- Supplements – A section for people interested in learning about supplements
- Finance and Blockchain – For investing and blockchain in the context of aging
- Biology of Aging – Topics covering the biology behind the aging processes
- Advocacy – We explore the concerns and positives of longer healthy lives
These knowledge hubs will continue to grow thanks to our researchers’ hard work in creating them. It is our hope that our readers will find this free educational content to be helpful to them and will visit often as it grows. We want these hubs to become a valuable resource for the community and one that will always be free.
Sadly, our field has a problem with snake oil salesmen trying to sell bogus products without the rigorous scientific scrutiny and testing that they need. The field has a history of overpromising and underdelivering, and we hope to act as a counterbalance to that through transparent and ethical journalism.
Because we are a nonprofit organization, you can be confident in our content thanks to our commitment to responsible journalism. We do not sell products such as supplements, and we provide our educational materials to help you make informed choices. We would go as far to say that only a non-profit organization can reliably deliver trustworthy news and information because it has no motivation to sell you products or otherwise mislead.
Gitcoin funding round
Gitcoin is a platform focused on supporting the development of open-source Web3 software. This is a decentralized system based on blockchain technology with the goal of funding “public good” projects that are intended to benefit everyone.
Fighting Alzheimer’s disease with light and sound
We recently took part in the Gitcoin GR15 fundraising round, which included two projects from lifespan.io.
The first of these is the Mindset project, a project to create a headset that produces light and sound at variable frequencies and may combat Alzheimer’s disease. So far, the project has already built a hardware and software system to control the headset. Initial testing also confirms that it can affect the brain through light and sound stimulation.
The system has generated preclinical data that suggests effective neural entrainment in humans. Neural entrainment refers to the observation that brainwaves will naturally synchronize to the rhythm of periodic external stimuli, including flickering lights and sounds.
Web3 crowdsourced clinical trials
The second project is the Lifespan.io Web3 program, which aims to improve how aging research and clinical trials are funded.
This project aims to develop a new form of blockchain-based crowdfunding. It is going to be designed in a way that allows optimal funding for large-scale initiatives such as human clinical trials for therapies that may slow down or even reverse age-related diseases.
It could also be used to help fund ambitious “moonshot” research projects, which typically receive no funding from regular channels. Traditional funding from grants suffers from intense competition and a culture of risk aversion, which favors projects with a higher chance of success but typically have limited impact if successful.
The organizers of the GR15 funding round are still doing their calculations to see how much each of the projects has raised, but we will keep you informed once we know more.
Lifespan.io President Keith Comito was part of a small team helping to curate the funding round alongside the Gitcoin team and members of VitaDAO. Keith also played a key role in leading the Gitcoin twitter spaces for this funding round, you can listen to the recordings below:
- Twitter Spaces – Gitcoin Desci panel part one
- Twitter Spaces – Gitcoin Desci panel part two
Leading the movement for longer and healthier lives
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