Mo Elzek does not think that, in the coming years, you will be able to pop a magic pill and decide what age you want to be. He does, however, think that a cocktail of targeted rejuvenation therapies could have a profound impact on your healthspan and lifespan.
That distinction, borne out of deep understanding of the subject (he trained as a doctor then moved into systems biology), summarises his position on where longevity stands and separates him from pockets of the industry that, giddy on recent attention and hype, get carried away about what the future may hold.
As the founder of London Longevity, a science studio focused on accelerating healthy lifespan extension, with a community of 1,200 scientists, clinicians, founders and investors, he has unique access and insight into a health megatrend, which he shares with Unfiltered over a coffee at a sunny Chelsea backstreet cafe.
London Longevity’s origin story is a charmingly unglamorous one, echoing Elzek’s preference for substance over show. He arrived in London from Cambridge, where arguing about unfinished ideas in public was part of the culture, and missed it. So he put an event on Meetup in September 2024 for the following week in a pub in Angel and nearly didn’t share it.
“I thought maybe four or five people would show up.” Between fifteen and twenty came, none of whom he knew. One was David Wood, the executive director of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation. Another was Oliver Zolman, the doctor who led Bryan Johnson’s Project Blueprint, and who is now one of the most visible practitioners of longevity medicine. He was in the room before there was much of an industry to be visible in.
Elzek also recalls the presence of Helga Sands, an octogenarian former banker who, according to The Times, recently flew to Panama to receive a “rejuvenation cocktail” with three key components: klotho, a protein for enhancing cognitive function, follistatin, for muscle mass and SIRT1, an enzyme that helps boost energy levels.
We wanted to find out from Elzek how close the industry is to delivering the kind of results Sands is looking for, in a quest that has taken her from that north London pub to a private clinic in Panama.
How far are we from “cellular rejuvenation looks promising” to actually being able to choose the biological age of your body?
I don’t think it’s going to be one treatment, one shot you take, like these GLP-1 peptides, and then you’re young again. There is a lot that has to happen. Even if we fully de-risk the partial reprogramming technology, we need to find a way to deliver these medicines to every cell in the body at the right dose, at the right time. We need to find ways to control it precisely so they don’t fully activate or go all the way to the pluripotent stage [when a cell has been reset so far that it loses its specialised identity and becomes like a stem cell].
Epigenetic reprogramming [resetting old cells so they behave like younger cells again] is definitely a very interesting idea. There is a lot of promise, but there are also a lot of open questions that most people don’t ask.
We don’t have enough safety data to know what happens in the long term. The only experience we know is from these animal studies that look and function younger, but the jury is still out regarding how they affect lifespan.
Could you see someone receiving dozens of different targeted rejuvenation therapies?
There is that tendency to think that there is one pill to take to feel younger again, which is kind of romantic. But I believe that there will be more precision medicine with multiple drugs to impact ageing. The way you age is different from the way I age, and even within the same person, ageing impacts different organs at different rates.
My heart is ageing at a different rate than my thymus, my liver and so on. I don’t think there is a way of figuring out all of this with one magic pill. I think there will be multiple different therapies that will be working together to move the needle on longevity.
The other important aspect that we can do today is measuring different organ’s biomarkers in the body routinely over time to know the overall health trajectory but also learn more about every organ. This will be super valuable to predict which organs are not doing well or showing signs of accelerated ageing. Instead of obsessing over one marker, such as your one biological age or even Vo2 max. This will make it easier to find the right longevity drugs or therapies for yourself when they hit the market.
Biology is messy and ageing is complex. We have about 12 hallmarks of ageing like DNA gets broken, mitochondria loses its functions, or telomeres get shorter, etc. We know that these hallmarks do not really contribute equally to ageing in different organs. And there is not one universal hallmark that drives the rest of it, which makes it more complicated to target with one magic pill
Is the industry getting ahead of itself? And if so, why is that?
It’s a small industry, and as within every small industry, you tend to hear few voices. That is dangerous. If you count how many people are actually doing something on ageing, and are trying to fix ageing directly and not dementia or other diseases of age, perhaps less than 1,000 people all over the world, which is so small in talent, in amount of funding, and ideas compared to cancer or Alzheimer’s. Some people sadly try to hype up things to attract funding now. This will change, but it will perhaps take some time.
We need the industry to be 10, 100, even 1000 times bigger, and it has the potential. Most people are aware of their health now, even if they are not specialists, which is a great opportunity. You see also people who are influential in money and in power and media who could lead that work as well, like investing in some of these areas. It has that potential to grow.
There’s a lot of hype around longevity at the moment. What is overhyped?
I wouldn’t dismiss any areas of longevity biotech. I think there is more hype in wellness, because there’s 100 times more money in wellness, in supplements and nutrition and gadgets. This is more overhyped compared to biotech. Most hyped biotech receives less than $100m, but they also have little harm to make as they are still in R&D and not selling to the public. It’s also more regulated than the wellness industry. Sadly, I don’t think any amount of vitamins will make us live longer, or even guarantee feeling healthier. There is really dangerous marketing out there, so people need to do their own research and ask about the science and evidence before they buy. It is not only their money, it is their health too.
At the moment there’s virtually nothing commercially available that will come close to the basic foundations of a healthy life, in terms of just moving, eating well.
It is mostly influencer marketing. They are often packaged as “longevity” pills with no pressure to prove science or show evidence. Not all wellness is bad, they could help sometimes but only after the fundamentals are done such as sleep, healthy diet and exercise. Everyone needs a little bit of hormesis in their lives. Hormesis is just inducing a little bit of stress in your system for a short time, which happens to come from fasting or exercise. If fundamentals are done properly, then get yourself this fancy supplement or gadget.
You’ve talked about how you’re more interested in getting someone with an AI background to a bio problem than someone with a biology background and giving them an AI tool. Can you explain your thinking?
AI is a general purpose technology, meaning that it is going to impact every discipline. The ironic thing is, the first industry that is affected by AI will be software and AI itself. There are going to be a lot of AI and software developers made redundant. You don’t need a company of a thousand AI engineers now; most of the code will be written by AI itself.
So this frees many AI engineers and software developers, and it’s a great opportunity to bring them into other fields.
Biology is a more data rich field than ever before. Matching AI talent with interesting problems in biology will have a great impact on the longevity field. They have deep knowledge of fundamentals of model architectures, training and representations, which many biologists today lack. This could bring fresh perspective to current problems, and help with the scale of biological datasets that are being collected today.
We have seen this first-hand. I have run multiple longevity hackathons across Europe. Half of the attendees were from an AI background. When matched with biologists and doctors who understand the problem better, we have seen incredible and innovative solutions in a short amount of time. We have much interest from pharma and startups who sponsored those hackathons who also recognise that they need to attract them.
Do you think what Isomorphic Labs are doing is emblematic of that approach?
Yeah, I think so. Eventually AI will be super capable with transformers or some new architectures, and it will be directed at solving humanity’s biggest challenges in health, climate, energy and other problems as well. So I predict that there will be more big AI labs going into bio.
That’s great for the industry, which has been only pharma-led for many decades. Biotech startups are innovation-rich but capital-poor. They often lack resources to run clinical trials, which is long and expensive. Pharma often function as private equity companies buying biotech and startups at certain inflection points when they are close to phase 2 or 3 and near the market. As buyers, they had little competition because the number of potential pharma buyers is small, especially when you account that pharma are organised around specific therapeutics areas, and don’t tend to buy in other areas.
But I expect big AI labs to change this in the next few years. They will also become potential buyers of biotech startups. They need more scientific talent and data infrastructure. Unlike pharma, they can afford being unprofitable for longer as they generate most of their revenues elsewhere, and know they can make a difference by being lean and using technology to make processes more efficient. This is not new, Calico and Isomorphic were founded by Google many years ago, but I expect we will see more examples in the next few years.
Do you think that could be part of the future commercial picture for AI companies?
Definitely. I think that would be great. I’m so optimistic that the move of AI companies towards bio is going to create a lot of innovation because they move faster and are willing to take much bigger and riskier bets. They are incentivised by moonshots and not narrow indications.
We have seen Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, both are scientists by background by the way, talk about curing all diseases, which will benefit the longevity field. AI companies also have more resources and are more open to collaborations than pharma companies, and will invest in more lab automation to make the iteration cycle much faster per dollar cost and outsource services to stay lean. So I think that will be great for everyone.
Could we get to a situation where, instead of pharma buying up promising startups, they are acquired by the big AI labs?
Yeah. I think so. It’s not obvious now, but I think it will be in five years. Buying a startup would let them move faster to acquire talent, infrastructure and data. AI models need big data. The race will be to acquire more data to make their models even more useful. This data is not only biology data but also clinical and wearables data. This data is not readily available on the internet, you need to generate or acquire it from somewhere.
They also have their strategic reasons, biosecurity. As AI becomes more powerful, biosecurity becomes a bigger risk. People with no to little knowledge could ask a capable AI to generate a harmful virus or drug. AI companies are aware of that. No one was able to ask Claude’s new model, Fable, any biology question unless you were a permitted user. AI companies might invest into biosecurity startups and acquire talent to build their know-how to stay ahead and manage the risks of their new models.
Can you see any direct link between the AI companies and Big Pharma? Could that be bridged?
It’s already happening. Pharma is aware and they are restructuring to be AI first. They also invest so much into automation and data generation. And there are big collaborations between big pharma and big AI companies. This has not paid off yet though, we don’t have any drug in the market that was discovered by AI. It is just because the cycles are long in pharma, but it will happen eventually.
The cost of bringing drugs to market has increased over time which is the opposite trajectory of other industries. It is also a riskier industry with much higher failure rates than even the space industry. I think AI could help create that efficiency. It already did in drug discovery and preclinical development in many ways, but more innovation still has to happen in clinical trials, which also happens to be the most expensive steps in the drug development pipelines. AI could help run trials, it could help analyse the mountain of data that is generated with every trial to select the right drug for the right patient at the right time. We also need more data, better processes and mindsets too. We don’t need to wait 20 years to see a drug come to market, we need longevity medicines today.
Photography Google DeepMind
