AI and Biotech Pioneer Alex Zhavoronkov Commits His Life, Estate to Longevity for All

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Oct 25, 2022, 08:27 ET

Zhavoronkov's "Longevity Pledge" invites the world's 1% and longevity enthusiasts to make longer, healthier human lifespans a reality for everyone

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Oct. 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the artificial intelligence, biotech and longevity pioneer Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, has publicly called for the world's most successful founders, altruistic billionaires, and dedicated longevity pioneers to join him in his unorthodox and principled "Longevity Pledge."

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and Chief Longevity Officer of Deep Longevity, the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, and an adjunct professor at the esteemed Buck Institute for Research on Aging. He serves on the Visionary Board of the Longevity Science Foundation, is part of the advisory board for longevity and biotech venture capital firm LongeVC and advises multiple other non-profits and startups working in longevity biotechnology. He is a renowned artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and longevity expert, founder, and scientist, hailing from Canada and Latvia.

Today, Alex Zhavoronkov formally announced his personal "Longevity Pledge." Through this pledge, Zhavoronkov committed all of his wealth and resources, as well as all of his remaining time to supporting and developing research and clinical solutions for extending healthy productive longevity for everyone on the planet.

"Making productive longevity, or the ability to live a longer, healthier life, is the most altruistic cause you can support," said Alex Zhavoronkov. "If we could extend everyone's life by just one more high-quality, healthy year, our world would benefit from roughly 8 billion more impactful years in a few generations. These years could mean thousands of new medical and scientific discoveries, impactful action on climate change, and more. This is no time to waste. I hope my example will motivate people with similar backgrounds to not only commit their wealth, but also their intellect, skills, and ingenuity to this strangely underappreciated cause."

Alex Zhavoronkov's personal Longevity Pledge included:

- Committing his entire fortune (including future earnings) to the cause of human longevity

- 100% of his time to advising, founding, creating and pursuing longevity initiatives

- Invest solely in companies with the potential to extend healthy, productive life, forming a global longevity ecosystem. These companies can grow, become sustainable, give rise to other companies, and return profits that can be reinvested in other longevity enterprises.

The full pledge can be read here.

By inviting others to join the Longevity Pledge, Alex Zhavoronkov believes that four significant breakthroughs for human longevity will be accelerated from approaching release in 20+ years to broadly available in 5 years:

- The development of AI-powered drug discovery platforms that will significantly derisk, accelerate, and democratize the discovery of novel therapeutics. The cost of drug discovery and development may exceed $3 billion to launch just one novel drug on the market. The process from disease hypothesis and target discovery to launch of the drug in the clinic can take at least 12 years and fails 99% of the time (source: Insilico Medicine, founded by Alex Zhavoronkov, which is at the forefront of this field and utilizes artificial intelligence, robotics and its global team to accelerate drug discovery).

- Personalized medicine, treatment and drugs: Develop fully automated systems that can customize care to each patient and help discover novel therapeutics and therapeutic combinations for individuals.

- Cryotherapy/cryobiology and biostasis: Recent advances can allow doctors to freeze and unfreeze organs rapidly, and possibly entire bodies, to enable long-term storage, transport, and even "biostasis" for the terminally ill or irreparably frail.

- Artificial intelligence and robotics-powered hospitals: All of the above breakthroughs support the creation of entirely new research and clinical infrastructure for medical care and repair. Creating an AI/robotics-driven preventive and regenerative research hospital is Alex Zhavoronkov's ultimate goal.

To learn more, please visit Longevity.Pledge.

About Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD

Professor Zhavoronkov is a Latvian and Canadian scientist and founder. He received his bachelor's degrees from Queen's University in Canada. After graduating, he began his career in the telecommunications and graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor industry, which catalyzed his interest in artificial intelligence and neural networks. In 2004, he decided to pursue a career in aging and longevity biotechnology and completed a master's degree at Johns Hopkins University and his PhD in biophysics from MSU. Afterwards, he directed the bioinformatics and regenerative medicine laboratories at one of the world's largest pediatric hematology, oncology, and immunology research centers. He also worked at and consulted several biotechnology companies and charitable foundations. In 2014, he founded Insilico Medicine, one of the first and largest AI-powered clinical-stage biotechnology companies with end-to-end drug discovery capabilities. At Insilico, he raised over $415 million, developed eight preclinical candidates, and took the aging research- and AI-discovered and AI-designed antifibrotic drug into human clinical trials. He also founded Deep Longevity, which is now part of a publicly-traded Endurance Longevity, a company specializing in aging biomarkers, and published the first aging clocks using deep learning. In 2013, he founded the Aging Research for Drug Discovery (ARDD) conference in Basel, Switzerland, which moved to the University of Copenhagen in 2019. Today it is the largest industry conference in longevity biotechnology. He serves on the Visionary Board of the Longevity Science Foundation and is the head of the advisory board for longevity and biotech venture capital firm LongeVC. Since 2012, he has published more than 160 peer-reviewed articles in Nature, Science, PNAS, and many other top journals. He also wrote a book called "The Ageless Generation," published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, which explained the pressing need to accelerate aging research to revive the global economy and avoid economic collapse. Since 2018, he has contributed to Forbes.com on pressing topics in AI and longevity. Learn more about Alex Zhavoronkov and the Longevity Pledge at www.LongevityPledge.org.