The longevity field remains small and starved for resources, especially the subfield devoted to the fundamental biology of aging, despite near-universal agreement that solving aging requires understanding it first. With VCs looking for clinical successes and state funding drying up for many projects, some enthusiasts are turning to a nonprofit model.
That path is anything but easy, particularly when you’re trying to secure donations in the hundreds of millions. Which is exactly what makes the Thalion Initiative so special: in the works for a good couple of years, it has now surfaced with strikingly ambitious plans.
Thalion has several top-tier names in geroscience as advisors, including Brian Kennedy, Vera Gorbunova, Vadim Gladyshev, Emma Teeling, Michael Levin, João Pedro de Magalhães, Steven Austad, Peter Fedichev, and many others. Max Unfried and Maria Marinova serve as Scientific Directors, while Todd White has taken on the role of Managing Director.
Thalion will fund research across five key areas: embryonic rejuvenation, comparative biology, synthetic biology, tooling, and modeling. This is far more than an eclectic collection of unrelated projects – it all feeds into a single plan spanning more than a decade. Intrigued and excited, I sat down with Todd White to discuss Thalion and its role in the longevity landscape, and this role promises to be considerable.
I know you from VitaDAO, but yours is one of the most unusual journeys into the longevity field. Let’s start there: describe how you got into this, and especially the last leg, from VitaDAO to Thallion.
It is unusual because I spent the first 25 years of my career in telecommunications. I’m an electrical engineer by training, not a biologist – which is interesting, because once I got involved in longevity, I noticed how many people in the field aren’t biologists either.
In 2018, a close family friend died suddenly from an autoimmune disorder. He was 52; I was 48. Processing that loss pulled me into reading about autoimmune disease and, more broadly, mortality.
In 2019, because of the telecom world, I was often around high-net-worth individuals, and longevity came up. Two themes emerged. First, most of them didn’t believe longevity scientists understood the science well enough to make real progress. Second, nobody had ever come to them with a fully fleshed-out plan for how you’d actually tackle aging. So, I foolishly put my hand up and said, “Let me get this straight – if someone came to you with a real plan, you’d be interested in pursuing it?” And the answer was generally yes.
That was November 2019. Then COVID shut everything down. Around 2021, VitaDAO came onto the scene, and like everyone else I was at home listening to Nathan Cheng talk about longevity – so I blame him. Between that and Aubrey de Grey’s book, those were the two things that got me going, and VitaDAO seemed like an interesting way to learn more about the space.
But, by the end of 2023, I’d realized that funding individual PIs in individual labs, which is what we were doing at VitaDAO, wasn’t going to move the needle. The science felt too small. In fairness to those PIs, they’re given a certain amount of money – rarely enough to do what they’d really like – so they run the experiments they can and hope for the next grant. Crypto, for all its easier access to capital, fell into the same small-pot, individual-project pattern.
The push toward translation worried me, too: if you’re not getting government grants, you go to private equity, and private equity needs a return. VCs back small biotechs hoping for a commercializable drug, but in many cases, a whole layer of fundamental research was still missing. Getting to a real therapeutic target takes far more money than most people in longevity ever see — it’s almost a lottery ticket.
So, I sat down with two colleagues I’d met through VitaDAO – Max Unfried and Maria Marinova – and said we needed to do something different. We set out to figure out what a real, solid plan would look like and flew ~30 aging researchers – all the usual suspects, Vera Gorbunova, Vadim Gladyshev, David Gems, that whole group – into Birmingham, England for a week. We told them, “We’re not here to talk about funding what you do in your labs. Our goal is to talk about what it will take to move the entire field forward.” We argued it out for a week, then met every week for the next nine months, including another week of in-person workshops in Boston.
I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall.
It was fascinating. Once you got past “this is what I do in my lab and what I need for my next paper and grant,” everyone became very open – a very different experience than a conference. We came away with about 170 questions that, if answered, would completely open up the field. João Pedro de Magalhães, from Birmingham, led turning that into a paper, published in GeroScience in November 2025 – the top 100 open questions.
From the full list, we then asked what research we’d need to do, and in what order, to answer them. That gave us 16 projects for Thallion across five pillars: comparative biology, embryogenesis and germline rejuvenation, synthetic biology, tooling, and computational biology. We built it into a 220-page plan and then had to get it resourced – that was most of 2025, and it’s still ongoing. What made the year so dynamic was that the US government cut so much funding – NIH, NIA, NSF all cut back – which changed the dynamics for a lot of people.
Not a great time to be raising money.
Some of the worst. But in one sense it was good, because it focused the people who would fund this kind of research on what really matters to them. One thing became clear: longevity has a terrible reputation right now. So, we decided we wouldn’t disclose who’s funding us unless they want to be public – the concern was almost entirely reputational.
People have worked on longevity for 25 years, and the serious research takes a long time, but in that window a lot of people came in selling supplements and things that don’t make a difference, and it poisons the well. We’ve ended up spending more time defending the field than anything else. Nobody really questioned the science we wanted to do; they questioned how funding it would affect their personal reputation.
Which is unbelievably unfair.
It’s tremendously unfair, and I’m frustrated for the PIs – top researchers being painted with the same brush as someone overclaiming results. But I’m glad I went through it, because now I understand better than ever how hard it is for a researcher to get the resources they need. And private equity is part of the problem too, because they want a quick return, and this work is not quick.
I want to circle back to public relations later, but first I want to understand what Thalion is. Your work is mostly about fundamental aging biology and laying the groundwork, including the tools, because retooling the biology matters enormously. What problem are you trying to solve, and what’s the roadmap?
A lot of biologists do a lot of guessing, because they don’t have the data to prove that what they think is true actually is – aging is longitudinal and the system is very complex. Thalion has three phases over a 15-year scope: the first runs from now to around 2033, the second from roughly 2033 to 2038, and so on. This first phase is mostly building tools and datasets – filling the gaps we need to do good science. We won’t really get to the science until around 2029 or 2030. You’re seeing the same logic on tooling at organizations like the Arc Institute and CZI, with their virtual-cell work and AI modeling.
Take comparative biology. Everyone talks about longevity, but we have very little proof that dramatically extending lifespan is possible – except in evolutionary biology. We have bowhead whales, naked mole rats: living, breathing examples of lifespan variation.
Sometimes across really close species, which means longevity can evolve relatively quickly, without fundamental changes to the organism.
Exactly. So, the first big project – actually, the biggest of them – is a mammalian biobank: 200 species with extremely deep -omics. Most biobanks collect tissues and do a genome sequence; we’re doing genomics, methylomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabololipidomics, single-cell or spatial – all the building blocks of life, very deeply. The 200 species run from the shortest-lived to the longest-lived, with a progression through the middle — the full range of lifespan variation in mammals.
Everyone talks about how AI will change everything, but I think people are over-indexing on it – not because it isn’t an incredible tool, but because we can’t yet teach it what to look for. That’s a lack of data, and not just more data: it has to be deep data. The biobank won’t just be tissues; it’ll be the multilayered -omics that give detailed, species-by-species information. That project alone is between $100 and $120 million, which would make it the biggest and most information-dense mammalian biobank of its kind ever built with over 2.5 million datapoints.
On tooling: part of the reason we have to guess is that we can’t see what’s going on. As soon as you can see a problem, you can start working out how to solve it. There are two main areas: microscopy and mass spec. One project is to improve the standardization and information extraction from mass spec; the other is to vastly improve microscopy.
The key is to do it in a living cell, as I understand.
That’s right – label-free, living tissue. We need those tools for our -omics. People ask why we don’t just use the biobanks that are already out there, but we need to collect tissues in a way that lets us analyze them with today’s tools and then, in five years, reanalyze with our own far-higher-resolution tools. That’s also why the biobank has an iPSC component.
That’s one of the most interesting parts – it starts from 50 species, I think.
Initially 50. We have some flexibility in the budget and may do iPSCs for all 200 species, but the commitment to our patrons is 50 to start.
Then comes computational biology. The biobank itself is huge — we’re scoped for 60 petabytes of storage, with a lot of GPUs, roughly the same scale as what CZI announced they were providing access to for researchers.
As we built the platform, we went back to first principles. You’ve been around the field a while: first it was longevity, then radical life extension, then healthspan. Those are all aspirational, marketing-style labels. We decided we’d say we do aging biology. So, the first question became: what is aging? Vadim Gladyshev published a paper in 2024 showing that biologists don’t even agree on what aging is. We tackled that head-on, ran a year of computational experiments, and came away thinking that aging isn’t actually the real problem.
I would argue that aging is a proxy for the problem. The real problem is something called homeodynamic remediation – an idea that goes back to the work of Robin Holliday and Suresh Rattan 20 years ago. Think about Parkinson’s: we call it an age-related disease because it usually shows up later in life, but any good description of the problem has to handle the edge cases. Michael J. Fox developed early-onset Parkinson’s at 29, near the peak of his resilience. Aging didn’t give him Parkinson’s – so why did he get it? It comes back to homeodynamics, the body’s ability, or inability, to repair damage.
In other words, maintaining homeostasis.
Exactly. Homeostasis is maintaining stability, and the systems that maintain it – clearing senescent cells, DNA repair – are what contribute to homeodynamics. I always channel my inner Peter Fedichev here, because Peter is a theoretical physicist who loves math, and we built a mathematical model to capture this. Internally we call it our homeodynamic remediation framework, or HDR, and all of our computational work currently goes through that lens. So, we’re challenging the assumptions in biology as we go – the quality of the data in biobanks, and even what the right question is.
Tell me about the embryonic reset part, where you have Vadim Gladyshev and Michael Levin working together. That should get every longevity enthusiast fired up. You want to combine embryogenesis with bioelectricity, which I find especially interesting.
Everything in biology is so siloed – senescent cells over here, bioelectrics over there. This comes back to HDR: rather than reduce the science, we want to embrace the complexity, and when you do, you realize bioelectric patterns apply to a lot.
We’ve been able to show where Michael Levin’s work makes sense and how it weaves in. Embryogenesis is the clearest example: at conception, egg and sperm come together, and over the next few days, as you move through the zygote and the development cycle, all the damage from both parents disappears. You get a cellular-level reset – ground zero – and then development moves forward. That reset is the key to how we rejuvenate cells, and it’s part of homeodynamic remediation: at that early stage, the system says, “There’s damage here; we have to fix all of it before we keep developing a baby.” There’s a bioelectric component to that first step, though I can’t say too much about it.
Why not?
Because that’s Michael’s research, and there’s IP involved. It’ll be disclosed as we go, but Vadim’s thinking and Michael’s thinking are coming together on how you get there. For now, we’ll be working mostly with mouse embryos and iPSCs, because of the moral issues around human eggs. So, one project is characterizing embryogenesis and the impact of bioelectrics in those early stages. Some of that work will also apply to the iPSCs – build the biobank, get the tissues, create iPSCs for different organs, then apply embryogenesis and bioelectric techniques across species. That will tell you a lot you couldn’t otherwise know.
Your work still comes down to funding particular projects and labs. The difference you’re proposing is to tie it all into one complete picture, a grand plan where the parts fit into each other. But can you tell me something about the funding? I’ve heard pretty insane rumors – including that you’ve raised 700 million.
That’s not crazy, in this sense: the total spend over the next eight years to do all of this research is $710 million, and we’ve been raising against that figure. Nobody has walked up with a single $710 million check. Different people have expressed interest to fund different projects – all milestone-driven, some general support. It’s a microcosm of everyone funding this research: some see value in the biobank specifically, some the embryogenesis or Michael Levin’s work, some the evolutionary side. A lot of my effort has been bringing people together and showing how, by helping solve one piece, they help unlock the others.
Now we have to deliver, and there’s a lot of skepticism — you want a lot of money, what guarantee is there that you can execute? Phase one is actually fairly straightforward: it’s data, with very little technical risk. There’s logistical risk but not technical risk, because we’re not stepping into the heavy-duty science yet. A biobank isn’t trivial, but most of it comes down to logistics — getting out there, collecting the right samples the right way, doing the omics work, which is the expensive part, and building the datasets.
You said you gave donors the choice to be named or not, but now you’re saying you can’t disclose any of them. Is that an organization-wide policy?
This is not really a policy – if tomorrow some billionaire decides to say, “I put this amount into Thalion,” that’s fine.
But nobody has said it yet – nobody wants to be openly associated with this?
Nobody yet.
That sounds frustrating, and it’s not ideal for your PR that the whole thing is so secretive. It would help to have a person, or a few people, who could serve as a public face.
The view was: when you have something concrete to release – the biobank, published work – there may be a reason to say something. Until then, no.
So even finding donors is…
Word of mouth. It’s all very quiet. The rationale comes back to reputation – and some of it is political: because of the way the current US administration has acted, a lot of those same potential patrons are very cautious about what they say publicly. Between the FDA and loss of US funding, there’s a sense that people are holding on and just trying to get through this administration.
That’s interesting, because from what I’ve heard, this administration is actually warming up to longevity – more than the previous one, in this particular respect.
True on one level. I’ve been involved in the Right to Try efforts in Montana and New Hampshire, opening up access to treatments. On the other hand, you have people saying they don’t want mRNA vaccines at the FDA – and mRNA and lipid delivery are a big part of how you deliver gene therapies and epigenetic reprogramming. You can use viral vectors, but mRNA is part of it.
So, there’s real uncertainty. Last year was firefighting, just dealing with life. This year, people are starting to come out of the woodwork – people who told me a year ago, “I’ve got to get through this administration stuff first,” are coming back, though still cautious. A lot of them have shifted money away from foundations into donor-advised funds, partly because they can give anonymously.
Going back to the programs – the comparative-biology program is vast and has all the right names. You’ve described the biobank, but other projects sound exciting too, like the chimeras, which seems the furthest off.
Most things build off the biobank. Once you have all that deep -omics data, you try to isolate the mechanisms that control lifespan, whatever they turn out to be. The obvious move is to take a short-lived mouse and genetically manipulate it to live longer.
So, it goes biobank, iPSCs, then transgenic mice. People do this with one or two genes, but once you want to manipulate four, five, six, eight at once, it becomes a real endeavor. You can breed mice to introduce genes over time, but to translate to humans, you obviously can’t tell people to have children and see if it works – you have to deliver the whole package as a gene therapy, so there’s real effort going into delivery.
Which is where the chimera project comes in – much more challenging technically, it lets you put cells from long-lived species into the embryos of short-lived ones. It’s such a long timeframe that it inevitably brings me back to the funding question: do you have any long-term commitments?
All commitments are targeting Phase 1 only. Part of the reason we structured it that way – beyond the fact that Phase 1 is already a lot of money – is that the plan will change, and we’ve been open about that. We’ll learn things that make us decide not to go further with a given project; we’re not going to fund it all the way through no matter what. The data of Phase 1 is fairly self-contained, so that’s what we’ve raised against. We have ideas and a good sense of the next two phases, but they may change.
There are a lot of moving parts, and you can’t start everything at once or move at the same pace on all of them.
Mostly, yes. In comparative biology, you can’t get into the chimeras and transgenic mice until you know which genes you’re working with. So, the biobank, the collection, and the -omics are really the next five years; the chimeras and transgenics come later.
As you said from the start, your work is heavily affected by public attitudes toward longevity. Do you have any plan to address that specifically?
No. We made two decisions early on. First, we’re not getting into clinical trials in this phase. There was a push from the researchers to go do things in humans, and we said we’re not ready at all. I hope I’m wrong – I hope BioAge comes out with drugs and some of the well-funded companies succeed – but we’re not doing the clinical side at this point.
Second, we’re not getting into the narrative. Part of the problem is that everyone keeps trying out narratives to see which one works, and it’s never been consistent. People like Nir Barzilai have moved to “geroscience” as the label, because they ran into the same “this is all snake oil” perception.
Other than some policy work with the A4LI – the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives – we’re staying out of communications. It would be great if the public could convince the government to put billions into this the way it does for Alzheimer’s, but we don’t see that as our job; it would need far more money, and there are already enough people interested. The real shift will come when a company like BioAge or Life Biosciences actually puts out a drug that can be called an aging drug. If one of them gets a Phase 2 and Phase 3 result that genuinely works, that changes the dynamic overnight.
Hopefully.
From a credibility standpoint, that’s what will make the difference. As for communicating it more widely – to some people it matters, to others it doesn’t. Because it doesn’t feel imminent or urgent to most people, it doesn’t get the airplay, and I don’t think we’d add anything unique to that conversation.
Fair enough. It’s just that you started from how hard it’s been to reach donors because of the worsening public climate around longevity. There is only a handful of small organizations trying to defend the idea of life extension. I’d argue that longevity does get airtime and attention, but in very unflattering ways, like with Kara Swisher’s new CNN show. It genuinely worries me that the field hasn’t been able to put up much of a defense.
It’s definitely had an impact on raising money, but it really only comes up when I’m in a room being grilled for an hour. When I started raising funds, I answered that question right up front. I usually walk in and say, “The longevity field is a mess. There’s so much snake oil – and yet there’s a core of genuinely talented researchers doing real science who are being painted with that brush unfairly. I’m here to correct that.” And yes, this probably won’t work – one figure on our site is that only 1.2% of preclinical drug assets make it all the way through. You lose nine out of ten before you even get to the FDA, and nine out of ten after that.
If you’re an engineer, the argument is: in what other field could you walk in and say, “I’m going to succeed 1.2% of the time,” and not be shown the door? Nobody pays for a 1% success rate – yet we do exactly that, routinely, in medicine, and we consider it acceptable.
That’s exactly one of the things I find most infuriating – that people can’t extend the norms they accept in medicine to longevity.
It comes down to desperation. If you have a family member suffering from Alzheimer’s, you see it; it causes a visceral reaction, so even a desperate option gets support. Same with cancer. In those cases, the immediate, physical suffering gets the response; the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Aging doesn’t have that. Even “100,000 people are dying every day” isn’t urgent enough, because it doesn’t carry the emotional connection of watching your grandmother slowly waste away.
So, when I walk into a room with someone who can write a check, if they have an emotional connection to it, that’s usually why they took the meeting in the first place — they have staff to handle everything else. If I’m in the room at all, I feel I’ve already come a long way.
What usually moves people is that a family member or a friend died of an age-related disease, rather than the idea that they themselves are going to die?
Right. Elon Musk is a good example. His attitude is, “Yeah, aging sucks. It’s an engineering problem. I’d like to wake up and not hurt.” He’s not worried about dying; he’s worried about whether his back is going to slow him down before ten meetings. It’s the immediate short-termism.
It’s always interesting to hear from someone who’s actually been in the room with wealthy individuals and understands how they think about aging.
In many ways they’re not so different from people who aren’t wealthy, but they do think about it differently. They’re used to money buying solutions – when they have an engineering problem, they buy more talent and the engineers deliver. If Elon has a problem with a rocket motor, he gets everyone in a room and asks, “What are we doing about it? The metallurgy is wrong? Then we’ll get someone to make the metal.” It’s a very can-do attitude.
My ideal patron is someone from a tech background who has also lost money in biotech, because then they understand the challenges. They come to me and say, “You want my money – what are you going to do differently?” That becomes the conversation, and at least I’m not educating them. I’d much rather have someone who isn’t naive and will ask the hard questions, because otherwise, three years out, they’ll ask, “Why don’t I have a drug for aging yet?” I want someone who understands this is a long haul – but the sooner we start, the better chance of succeeding we have.
What is your general read on where the field sits in terms of science, biotech, regulation? We’ve talked a lot about public perception. Where do nonprofits and citizen science fit in the long term?
I’m encouraged. If you’re a small biotech, it’s probably the most encouraging part of the space, because impact investors tend to be more patient – but the amounts are small, enough to get you to a Series A or B.
The science is coming along. Realistically, longevity hasn’t gotten its due: if we’d had cancer-level funding for even five years, we’d be miles ahead, simply because you can cover more ground faster. Everyone’s doing great work with a relatively tiny amount of money.
But, we still have a long way to go, and it’s naive to think AI is just going to magically solve it. AI is a fantastic tool, but as far as I can see, we’re going to fail faster and cheaper – the end result won’t be that different. Maybe a drug candidate costs $2 million to reach a trial instead of $4 million, but its odds of success are still about one in ten. Efficacy is the thing I don’t see AI solving, because it’s trained on what we already know; it doesn’t synthesize drug candidates, it sifts data and proposes solutions, but no better from an efficacy perspective than a good PI could.
I’d actually argue AI will help more on your side – fundamental biology, understanding aging – if you feed it a lot of data, which is exactly what you’ll be generating. That’s where it can shine, more than in picking drug candidates.
Right, and that takes time. For the next couple of years, there’ll be a lot of noise about how great AI is going to be, but the real value, at least from our perspective, comes in three or four years, once we have the datasets. You see this everywhere now – ARIA and others talking about building datasets for AI – because they’ve realized they don’t have the resolution or the data density they need to make good decisions.
Should we expect milestone updates from Thalion?
Yes. For the biobank, if you go to biobank.thalion.global, that’s essentially the scorecard – you’ll be able to watch our progress, and we’ll do the same for the other projects as they develop. It’s all part of letting people measure our impact.
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