Read More at Fight Aging!
Aubrey de Grey, co-founder of the Methuselah Foundation and later the SENS Research Foundation (SRF), funding the latter organization with $13M of his own resources to add to the donations of philanthropists, has over the past year separated from the SRF, for reasons that I intend to neither discuss nor have a public opinion on. Per his presentation at the recent Longevity Summit Dublin, he has now founded the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation in collaboration with the Ichor Life Sciences principals to continue to bring funding into the programs that he believes need to happen in order to unblock important lines of research and development leading to rejuvenation therapies.
It is quite clearly the case that we wouldn’t be as far advanced as we are today without the past twenty years of patient advocacy, agitation, education, outreach, and philanthropic funding of blocked and neglected research, without the efforts of the staff and leadership of the Methuselah Foundation, SENS Research Foundation, and their growing list of allies in the research community.
Details are somewhat sparse as to which specific programs will be undertaken by the LEV Foundation, but we should probably expect them to be much along the same lines as the work done at SRF over the past decade. Combining interventions appears to be an initial focus; it was always the case that the SENS approach to aging was envisaged as many different therapies targeting different forms of age-related damage. Meanwhile, many promising programs are roadblocked in the early stages by problematic financial and regulatory incentives, which can only be efficiently bypassed by philanthropic funding aimed at simply getting the job done: do the work, unblock the program, get it to a point at which it is interesting to entrepreneurs and biotech investors. That approach to progress at the SRF has led to a number of spin-out biotech companies working towards human rejuvenation, and more of the same lies in the future at the LEV Foundation.
The SRF (and Methuselah Foundation!) of course continue as they were: they are still conducting useful programs that advance specific areas of research relevant to human rejuvenation towards readiness for well-funded development. The Methuselah Foundation tends to focus much of its energy on projects relating to the tissue engineering of replacement organs, and running the Methuselah Fund for investment in biotech startups in the longevity industry, while the SRF has a broader remit connected to the fundamental biochemistry of aging, and the SENS vision of rejuvenation as repair of the underlying molecular damage that causes aging. Both are doing good work.
Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation exists to proactively identify and address the most challenging obstacles on the path to the widespread availability of genuinely effective treatments to prevent and reverse human age-related disease.
Aubrey de Grey inspires at Longevity Summit Dublin 2022
Dr. Aubrey de Grey presented an overview of the projects LEV Foundation is already funding during his talk at Longevity Summit Dublin, video of which is available.