From day one, our vision at Rejuve.AI has been collaborative. We envision a decentralized wellness ecosystem where all stakeholders, including users, benefit from each other and drive further progress.
Our recent partnerships with brands like Erbology, Purovitalis, and NoAGE — all pioneers in the longevity space — are great strides toward this ecosystem. These collaborations improve the community’s access to superb products for better health and vitality.
Today’s partnership announcement is very different but just as exciting. We recognize the critical need for collaboration in research, securely exchanging data and algorithms with other organizations to gain insights from the patterns within.
With that said, we’re proud to reveal our new partnership with OpenCures. OpenCures is a health-focused company that provides a platform for individuals to measure their health using advanced technologies. It offers tools for tracking lifestyle factors, integrating lab results and wearables, and analyzing data to understand what works best for each individual. The platform also enables users to participate in clinical trials, manage personalized supplement plans, and order lab tests directly.
To celebrate this monumental partnership, we have an exclusive interview with OpenCures CEO Dr. Kevin Perrott. Dr. Perrott is one of the most active and fascinating figures in aging research. His insights are sure to inspire and inform our community.
We hope you enjoy the interview and join us on this exciting journey toward better health and longevity.
Interview Highlights
Reflections on Longevity Industry's Growth
Healthcare Lessons from Surviving Cancer
Importance of Partnerships in Research
Enabling Personalized Wellness Protocols
Overlooked Areas of Aging Research
Thoughts on Self-Experimentation
Lessons from Running Motorcycle Business
Tribute to Prof. Judith Campisi
Hi, Kevin! Thanks for taking the time to chat. We know you’ve been super busy lately, traveling the world for different longevity events. So can we start with some reflections on the field’s growth since you first joined it?
Kevin: Well, the world is a lot different and the field of longevity has definitely evolved. When I first became aware of the non-zero probability of healthy life extension and indefinite lifespans, even thinking of life extension was mostly considered sci-fi and pseudoscience. In 1999, I was the lead programmer and network admin for our large family business (motorcycle and snowmobile dealership in Canada) and had some training in biochemistry. I was helping bring the internet to our company when I became aware of the Human Genome Project and, like many, understood that we were entering an era where biology could be programmed and the internet would allow unprecedented levels of collaboration.
I was always a science fiction buff and from childhood had always thought that aging and death were problems that would be solved by the time I would have to worry about them. However, when I turned 37, about halfway to my expected lifespan and experiencing age-related functional decline, it was clear I needed to start paying attention to the science of longevity.
I had some biochemistry training and started keeping up with the latest studies with the help of a new internet feed called Eurekalert. I came across the work of Robert de Costa where a single extra copy of FoxM1 gave elderly transgenic mice the ability to regenerate their liver as quickly as young mice. It blew my mind and in that moment, I realized that the possibility of getting more healthy years was within the reach of humanity, but it was also clear that leaving it up to chance was not something I was willing to do. So, using this new-fangled internet technology, I searched, and found, others who shared my desire to accelerate the process of turning these breakthroughs into benefits.
I found my first longevity tribe amongst those who formed the “Immortality Institute” (still active and since renamed LongeCity), founded by Bruce Klein, first as a bulletin board chat group and then a bona fide forum. It was like I had been wandering in an intellectual desert for decades and had found an oasis of sanity where people, smart and rational people, undertook the evidence-based discussion of how to engineer indefinite lifespans. From that group emerged many of the leaders in today’s longevity field, including the SENS Research Foundation, the Methuselah Foundation, and other groups and individuals. Notably different from today, there was no money or fame to be had in the field at that time; our motives were to solve the problem of aging in the shortest time possible.
Since then, the field has gone from a small kernel of dedicated thought leaders and scientists who held the spark of the rational pursuit of healthy longevity, where passion for minimizing the time to the arrival of interventions in aging was the sole driver, to now the involvement of the profit motive to make money off the desire of individuals to live healthier longer. There is a lot of energy pouring into the field, a veritable torrent. The question is whether the field has the ‘machinery’ capable of translating that energy into products and services people need as quickly as possible.
For readers who may be unfamiliar, you’re a cancer survivor. How did that open your eyes to the shortcomings of healthcare and inspire your current line of work?
Kevin: Getting cancer certainly was an education on many levels. The most important thing I learned was how quickly your health can be taken away, but more practically, I learned that no one cares about my health as much as I should, and I needed to take responsibility for my well-being instead of abdicating it to a “system” that really doesn’t have my best interests at heart. My experience underlined how little the “customer” of medical care is actually satisfied with the state of health technology development. The current paradigm is about acute sick care and crisis management, and what is on offer is not much better than what was available 50 years ago. It also underlined to me that the reason health technology development is so slow is that those who actually need the therapies have almost no influence on the pace of development. It’s clear that this is a broken economic cycle when customer satisfaction has so little impact on the business of health technologies. If the medical system were a retail environment dependent on customer satisfaction for their profitability, they would be broke in a month.
OpenCures is a for-benefit company. Could you elaborate on that and the company’s overarching mission?
Kevin:
a) A for-benefit is a for-profit C-corp whose investors believe in accomplishing the mission of the company over simply maximizing share value. It’s a relatively new legal corporate definition that allows companies the luxury of considering the interests of the company’s non-financial stakeholders, such as the environment for a company that makes environmentally friendly products. These are considered as important as the interests of financial stakeholders such as investors. The non-financial stakeholder that OpenCures considers in being a public for-benefit corporation is human health itself. We have been fortunate in that our financial stakeholders are investors who understand that ultimately, “health” is the real wealth they are interested in.
b) OpenCures’ mission is to connect the consumer to the value of their health data and the biospecimens from which it is derived and empower them to focus its collective value on the problems they are interested in. We help people measure their health with research-grade tools, such as mass spectroscopy, to obtain the highest resolution snapshot of their health scientifically possible. We then provide them with a platform in which they can aggregate and share their data and biospecimens and focus their value on the research problems they are interested in. We can then use this data to help create an AI-driven model of humans that can test millions of therapies at once. It’s why I think our relationship with Rejuve.AI is essential. The consensus “Human Health Multiome” we need to decipher is the most valuable tool we could create to accelerate the development of aging interventions.
Could you give our readers a simple walkthrough of the OpenCures experience?
Kevin: If you are one of those people who understand that "if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it", you are probably someone who would appreciate our platform. You can go to my.opencures.org and create a profile as an individual. From there, you can import existing health data from many sources into your profile and create charts of biomarkers over time. You can use these to understand what is happening ‘under the hood’ in your health and gain insights into what changes might help to minimize the risk of disease and maximize healthy longevity. Most of the time, other than just importing old measurements, people want to make new ones. For that, we help individuals access research-grade assays. Most often, we start with the ProdromeScan from Prodrome Sciences, which I call a “smog check for your health.” The ProdromeScan is an untargeted metabolomic assay that, in addition to many standard clinical biomarkers, uses mass spectroscopy to measure lipids not normally measured but are important for health. We help people provide a blood sample and arrange for the handling, storage, and shipment of the sample to the assay vendor. The returned results are stored in the individual’s profile, and we then schedule a workshop to go over the results with the individual to help them understand what actions they might take if any are non-optimal. It’s like a GPS for your health.
How do you see AI-based entities such as Rejuve.AI accelerating OpenCures’ mission?
Kevin: Creating a computer model of human health not only requires vast amounts of data but also the appropriate algorithms for its analysis in order to gain insights from the patterns within it. Although there is much to be gained from simple statistical analysis of health data (using principal component analysis, for example), creating a prediction engine that incorporates genetic, proteomic, metabolomic, and other multidimensional data will require advanced AI models. Rejuve.AI not only has the models, but it also has the commitment over the years to the understanding of healthy longevity and the interest in increasing lifespan that most AI-based entities do not have. Having Rejuve.AI as a partner, one that understands that we are in it for the long haul, helps build the stable ecosystem that we need to co-create to minimize time to the development of interventions.
Why do you think partnerships in general are important for research? And why are some organizations hesitant about collaborations?
Kevin:
a) Partnerships are important for any complex effort that spans multiple domains of expertise and business. And developing interventions to cure aging is possibly the most complex challenge humanity can undertake. Partnerships must actually extend beyond research and into the actual provision of products and services that research enables. Coordinating the application of currently available health technologies with the acquisition of data that tells us how effective those technologies are integrates research with application.
b) The current health technology development paradigm does not reward collaboration, which requires transparency and a willingness to share. Both of these attributes are often penalized by the business development environment. Even when it is obvious to potential partners that a collaboration is in the best interests of all parties and would be helpful in accomplishing mutually held objectives, such as curing aging, collaborations require resources and time that may not be easily found. Ultimately, it is a matter of will, intent, and underlying objectives. Finding collaborators who share a common vision and are able to work as a team is hard in a world where we are told we need to 'dominate the space' and 'control the narrative' or 'be the first mover'. Outmoded competitive models and misaligned incentive structures are slowly being replaced with win-win scenarios. We are creating one.
How can decentralization make it easier to run longevity clinical trials?
Kevin: Inarguably, the most difficult and expensive part of health technology development is clinical trials. The clinical trial paradigm is built for drug development and the use of health technologies which have a significant risk. It seeks to protect vulnerable individuals from incompetent or predatory practices. I remember reading about how the first X-ray machines were used by door-to-door salesmen as ‘depilatory’ devices to help women remove facial hair. X-rays removed facial hair, but unfortunately also killed bone marrow stem cells and caused osteoporosis of the jaw leaving women prone to fracturing. There were no trials to test these portable X-ray machines at the time. This was just one of the major events that helped bring the FDA and our modern clinical trial design into being. However, for much less risky research, such protection is overkill with a fully informed consenting individual who only wants to know more about their normal healthy biology and ways to keep it so.
By helping individuals measure their health in a standardized fashion and giving them a platform where their health data can be ingested and normalized, we can help people who are testing various interventions on themselves make their data statistically meaningful and capable of being aggregated and mined for new insights, outside of a clinical trial. Decentralization is just empowering individuals with the scientific tools and knowledge they need to help themselves without themselves needing to be scientists or health professionals. I should emphasize that we are dealing with mostly healthy people or individuals with conditions that are managed by their healthcare professional and are meant to be an adjunct, not a replacement for any regular care.
Heading into 2024, we asked the Rejuve Network’s leadership about the bottlenecks ahead of the longevity field. One bottleneck pointed out was the lack of holistic wellness protocols (that consider the role of food and other lifestyle pillars). How can data integration platforms like OpenCures’ help in establishing such protocols?
Kevin: OpenCures has created a protocol builder where individuals can define the steps they take to manage their health and share that protocol with others who can use it as a starting point for their own protocols. Many people spend hours of research refining these personalized protocols, which involve altering simple lifestyle factors like diet and exercise. Being able to capture that knowledge and share it with others is a huge benefit. There is no doubt that there will be a lot of people who are proponents of this protocol or that protocol, but ultimately having a mechanism where such protocols can be discussed and argued about is a good thing. Of course, the “proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and the results people get as evidenced by the measurements of the effects of such protocols will be the final arbiter.
What’s one area of aging research you wish more scientists probed into?
Kevin: Having spent my PhD studying senescent cells and the inflammatory molecules they secrete, I think there is a huge gap to be filled on their effects on the stem cell niche. Our organs lose cells as we age, and that loss can be attributed to the declining capacity of stem cells to replace those losses in situ. Inflammation is the signal for stem cells to divide, but similar to insulin resistance from exposure to chronically high levels of glucose, if inflammatory signals are too high for too long, I think resistance to those signals occurs and the threshold required to activate stem cells becomes higher and higher. This ultimately results in slower and slower cellular replacement. Aging is about loss of function, and loss of function is clearly tied to a loss of cells more than just loss of cellular function. There are quick wins to studying how inflammation affects stem cells and their ability to influence regeneration.
“We are the cavalry” is a motto you live by, emphasizing the role of individuals in taking control of their health. With that said, what are your thoughts on self-experimentation?
Kevin: Self-experimentation is a fundamental human right. A properly informed and consenting individual should not be prevented from performing such self-experimentation if they are taking responsibility for the outcome. That being said, it must be acknowledged that the information provided to the individual must be in a form they can understand in order to gauge the risk appropriately, and often such information is missing or withheld. There is room for improvement and for the development of services that help individuals determine if a particular course of self-experimentation is something they should undertake.
Do you think longevity has gone mainstream yet and is that ultimately desirable?
Kevin: The past few years have seen the spark of hope for interventions in aging and promoting healthy longevity fanned into a flame. I don’t think we are yet at a level where healthy longevity is mainstream, but as more and more people see that undertaking simple actions such as exercise and targeted supplementation work, they will begin to extrapolate and we will see a huge push for science to reach beyond simple lifestyle interventions. I think the question of whether longevity is “ultimately desirable” is like asking whether being alive at all is desirable. There are three main views on living longer: one where we live longer with disease, the second is we don’t live much longer but we are healthier in our declining years, compressing the period of morbidity, the third is we increase health and lifespan in parallel. I don’t believe that people will pay for longer lives with longer periods of disease, so that’s a non-starter, nor do I think people will settle for simply compressing the period of morbidity. I always maintain that we should just focus on maintaining health as it’s hard to die if you’re healthy. As far as being desirable, from an individual’s perspective, healthy longevity is desirable if one is enjoying their life at all, but even more importantly from a social perspective, humanity sorely needs the wisdom that is trapped in frail and suffering bodies and minds to help us mature into a species that can deal with the long-term consequences of short-term thinking.
Fun fact: You’ve also been involved in running your family’s motorcycle and snowmobile business for decades. Has being around these machines and motors influenced how you approach human biology at all?
Kevin: Absolutely. When one understands the design and operation of a complex machine like a motorcycle or snowmobile, one can see analogies in biology, and there are many, as our bodies operate on the same physical principles. It also helps me see my body as an amazing feat of engineering and one whose malfunction is amenable to outside intervention. I am now a miracle of modern technology. My thyroid, an organ that evolved over millions of years, is completely gone, and its function is entirely replaced by a single pill taken daily with (as far as I’ve been able to determine) no negative consequence for that replacement. Much of what we are can be “replaced” by an equivalently functioning “part”.
The world recently suffered a massive loss with the passing of legendary aging biologist Judith Campisi. As a student of hers, what pearls of wisdom that you learned from her would you like to pass on to younger researchers?
Kevin: Judy was dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge in ways that only the greatest scientific minds could be. She had much to share of value and was free and generous with her wisdom. But for myself as a graduate student (mature as I was), there were some key things that I will always remember. First, never trust any results unless you replicate them with your own hands. Second, the “data is the data”; accept what the results are, even if you really, really want them to be different. Lastly, you need to have the appropriate “n” for a sample size in accordance with the effect size before you can trust any statistics (aka do a power analysis!). She was fiercely independent and a great friend, and I will miss her dearly, as will anyone else whom she touched.
What advancements in longevity are you currently most excited about?
Kevin: AI, of course! Without it, we are still and will remain in the stone age when it comes to development of interventions in aging.
Last but not least, what’s next for OpenCures?
Kevin: We are creating a collaborative of the willing, wise, and competent; those who have their priorities straight and have a piece of the solution to the challenge of intervention development. We are going to find others who understand there is a non-zero probability of developing effective interventions in aging in the lifetimes of even our older loved ones. What’s next for OpenCures will also be what is next for Rejuve.AI, ProdromeSciences, AgelessRx, and hopefully many others who see the end game that is coming. We will together create the tools and knowledge we need to make the degeneration of aging a footnote in human history and usher in an era of unprecedented health and longevity, or I will die trying. ;)