In a startup age influenced by the transhumanist culture of Silicon Valley — where AI researchers are building technology to upload your consciousness into the cloud, and millionaires are injecting their children’s blood into them to keep them young — it was never going to take long for founders to start applying powerful machine learning models to the science of longevity.
Today, startups are using AI to find new treatments for age-related diseases, biohacking your gut microbiome to slow down the ageing process and combining health-tracking wearables and powerful chatbots to create personalised coaches to help you make better lifestyle decisions for a longer healthier life.
It’s a lifestyle
While serial founder Bryan Johnson has made longevity famous by injecting himself with youthful plasma from his so-called “blood boy” (otherwise known as his son), the basic principles of many longevity treatments are much less sinister.
For Richard Skaife, cofounder of UK and Malta-based Blēo, the pursuit of a longer life is grounded in healthy habits like a good diet, exercise and solid sleep. His startup combines a biometric-tracking wearable — that monitors factors like your quality of sleep, blood pressure and step count — with a chatbot-powered app that acts as your personalised longevity coach, prompting you to make better and healthier decisions.
Skaife says that one key feature of the app — which also reviews your diet using computer vision AI models to interpret user-uploaded photos of your meals — is that it doesn’t require you to ask questions, but proactively prompts you with advice.
“What we thought would be really cool was: let’s deliver a large language model, which doesn’t require you to actually ask any questions. It takes the biometric data, it takes the data around what food you’ve been eating, it takes sleep data, and then it actually delivers all of the information to you,” he explains.
“It will look at your diet and say, ‘’Great, I can see that you’ve eaten this amount of carbs, you’ve had this amount of fat. Just checking, you’re drinking enough water, make sure you go easy on the alcohol.”
The longevity coach is powered by a bespoke AI model developed by Blēo’s team, which is trained on what Skaife describes as a “broad but deep” corpus of research and information about the factors that affect how long we live.
This base knowledge of longevity science, which is baked into the model, is then combined with the user’s dietary and biometric data to provide personalised advice that’s grounded in reliable research.
Getting into the gut
Another startup that’s using AI for a personalised longevity solution is Croatia-based Ani Biome, which provides users with a supplement plan designed to optimise their gut microbiome, reduce inflammation, strengthen natural immunity and increase energy levels and mental clarity.
The startup also uses computer vision to let users do regular scans of their tongues with their smartphone camera. This scan, Balen says, can interpret signals like white or yellow coating on the tongue, puffiness, toothmarks and ulcers, to extract information about the user’s gut health.
“Each one of these factors is connected to certain biological processes,” he tells Sifted, adding that the tongue can give indications about the level of inflammation in the body, as well as its metabolic rate.
This information is supplemented with a regular questionnaire about their emotional and physical state. It is then fed into Ani Biome’s AI model, which is trained on medical research from Western, Vedic and traditional Chinese medicine on gut health.
“Based on that we approximate which metabolites and which molecules would be most beneficial for each individual on a monthly basis,” says Balen.
The startup then sends users a monthly supplement plan and continues to feed user data into the model to make the supplements more precise to the user’s needs.
“Our vision is to be able to precisely modulate the gut microbiome in order to enhance our biology,” Balen adds.
The Tesla of longevity?
Both of these startups are largely addressing longevity in a way that avoids getting into heavily regulated medical territory, by focusing on the lifestyle and supplements market. But both companies are also getting into more clinical care.
Blēo is building a network of doctors via a telehealth platform, who can prescribe drugs like rapamycin, which has been shown in studies to reduce the chance of cardiovascular disease and extend the lives of mice. Ani Biome is conducting clinical trials, in partnership with a consortium of universities, to validate its AI model’s effectiveness at modulating our gut microbiome.
Other longevity startups are going full tilt on clinical treatments. Belgium-based Rejuvenate Biomed has developed an AI screening platform to evaluate if safe, existing treatments can be used in new combinations to postpone the onset of certain age-related diseases.
These companies show just how broadly AI can be applied to the question of how to help us live longer but, as Skaife describes, they are also working in a new field that doesn’t fit into modern healthcare systems.
“If you go and see an extremely busy GP about the fact that you want to live a longer and healthier and happier life, he’s likely to say, ‘Wonderful, what have you come to see me for because I deal with infections and broken bones,’” he says.
“This sector is going to be very big. We want to be the place where people come and access it. But what exactly is that going to look like?”
The nascent stage of the longevity market means there are still questions about whether these companies can convince public healthcare systems and insurers to adopt these treatments and see the value in them. Despite this structural challenge, Balen believes that it will be new startups with innovative models that pioneer success in this new area, and that it will be those making use of AI who will win.
“In a new industry you need something completely new,” he says.
“We will have the Pfizers of longevity and those are being made somewhere in a garage now. Maybe that will be us, maybe someone else. But it will be computational for short, because the science of the future is computational.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-longevity-startup-entrepreneur/
