🧬🛍 26 - Big News!, AthenaDAO, Longevity Investors
Sorry for sending this twice, but apparently Substack does this new thing of showing an “upgrade to paid” when we used the Subscribe Now button. What an awful idea in UX…we took out all these buttons out.
👋 Hello, and welcome to Curation for Longevity by MYKIGAI.
In this newsletter, we have some big news 🗞, as well as an exclusive interview with the founders of Maximon’s Longevity Investors Conference next week! 🚀
To my dear Euro friends who spend time in Gstaad and St. Moritz, if you are curious about longevity investing, send me an email, I am sure I can still get you into the private Longevity Investors Conference I was going to be a speaker at. Due to recent developments, I had to with a heavy heart decline spending time in the glorious Swiss mountains and hang out with The Gstaad Guy. However, we had been working on this exclusive interview and hope you learn more about how crypto/blockchain keep colliding with scientific research. Laura Minquini
🗞 News! 🗞
Speaking of blockchain and scientific research: AthenaDAO ha joined the first cohort of Bio.xyz, the Biotech DAO. Are you scratching your head yet? 🧠 What is she talking about? The reason we took a bit of a break is revealed! We were not in a break, if anything, we were busier than ever.
AthenaDAO is a decentralized collective aiming to fund women’s reproductive health research and drug discovery 🧬🪩
Lack of research and investment has hindered innovation around women's health and created gaps in:
Data 📊
Funding 💰
Markets 📉
Where friends in longevity like VitaDAO, and platforms like Molecule, are working on IP innovation, when it comes to women’s health, we have to create opportunities to get to IP generation.
It might come to a surprise to those who know my work in longevity that I am moving my focus to women’s reproductive health, however women’s healthy longevity is closely tied to it. Some things that shocked me into action:
🧬 Women’s cellular aging accelerates during menopause, which impacts our health adversely.
👶 There are quickly falling fertility rates. 🙅♀️ This research is (criminally) underfunded. 💁♀️ Women themselves are completely misinformed about the limits of our biology and how little innovation there has been around it. e.g. IVF is so invasive, it is not cutting edge technology.
I want to do everything possible to push for better health outcomes for women, and to get more funding to research that truly gets us closer to equality. We do ultimate need to stay healthy for as long as possible to fund our longer lives. I co-authored an essay on this with Dr. Ira Sobel last year: What is FemFintech and why is it so important for women’s longevity?
And I always ask: How can we talk about the 100 year life without advancing the options for women’s reproductive life?
If you want to learn more about what this DAO thing is all about, please read the recent article on Crunchbase where AthenaDAO appeared and I was quoted! 👉 Pharmaceuticals Are Getting A Blockchain Makeover
We are proud to be the first woman-led Bio DAO in Decentralized Science (DeSci). 💁♀️
If you want to join, keep informed, or get involved, subscribe below! We will share the knowledge of the researchers, clinicians, and women communities that are working to advanced science and find more solutions so women have more choices.
Learn more about AthenaDAO and listen to the latest interview with our panel discussion Dr. Jennifer Garrison, the director of the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity, a trailblazer in the field, and a supporter and advisor, to our mission.
Announcements! 📣
With that said, there will be some changes to Curation for Longevity. Girish Harinath, our Geroscientist, is taking over the role of Director. From now on please feel free to email him directly with ideas and news to girish@mykigai.com! 👏
We are also looking for contributors! Girish’s passion is communicanting science to the general public in a way that impacts their every day lives, so he will still focus on the Longevity Toolkits. (We published Longevity Molecules V - Cocoa Flavanols - Part 3 today!)
If you are passionate about longevity, have a unique perspective, and want to share it to our big audience, please email Girish!
Exclusive Interview: Marc P Bernegger and Dr. Tobias Reichmuth
Recently, I had been curious about the Maximon model; they are a longevity company builder, rather than just a fund. Their mission is to empower entrepreneurs to build impactful, science-based and scalable companies providing healthy aging and rejuvenation solutions.
Maximon identifies promising business opportunities in the field of longevity and helps build companies from scratch, providing proven structures, financing and a unique community for building a successful longevity venture.
I had the chance to interviewMarc P. Bernegger and Dr. Tobias Reichmuth on this ahead of their upcoming conference.
Parts of this interview have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Laura: A lot of crypto entrepreneurs and enthusiasts are into longevity. Why do you think that is?
Marc P. Bernegger: Crypto entrepreneurs and enthusiasts are forward-looking, open-minded and technology-driven. They are leading the way, as they see the potential in the field and the technology.
Laura: What made you personally get into this field?
Dr. Tobias Reichmuth: Marc met Aubrey de Grey at a conference in Geneva back in 2009 and was fascinated by his insights about extending human life and healthspan. Later we both got exposed to Singularity University in Palo Alto in 2016 seeing death not as something inevitable, but more of a combination of sicknesses which you can actually fight. If people reach the age of 120 years old and stay healthy until they die, everything changes. Our entire social systems will change. This also means that we will see many huge investment opportunities in different industries and sectors. There are also some interesting venture funds out there, some of which are also speaking at the Longevity Investors Conference (more about this later!). This topic is one which moves people. Next to making a nice profit, they share the interest of staying healthy and living longer. With their investments, they support research we will all benefit from. Longevity investments therefore provide a double dividend, not only giving a financial return, but also supporting scientific progress. I think this is the motivation of many of the investors in that field.
Laura: Maximon is a company builder. What made you go this route instead of just an investment fund?
Marc: As entrepreneurs ourselves we think it is far more fun and far more rewarding to build companies together with other founders rather than just investing in existing ones. In our structure as a company builder, we can bring much added value into our companies from day one and help our teams to grow and scale their longevity related businesses.
Laura: You have launched the Maximon longevity prize. What is your focus for it and how does it differ from the other prizes?
Tobias Reichmuth: We are on a mission to extend human health-span; helping people to stay fit, healthy, and happy until old age. We believe that supporting bold, breakthrough ideas and the scientists behind them is much needed to speed-up the translation of science to products and services available to everyone. With this prize, we are hoping to bridge the gap between science and clinic, give exceptional researchers the resources they need to expand their work and accelerate their research to find interventions for a longevity-driven society. The prize winner will be announced during the Gala Dinner at our Longevity Investors Conference, meaning the winner, as well as the two runner ups, will be able to present their work in front of private and institutional investors and network with them.
From September 28th to September 30th this year, Maximon is hosting an exclusive longevity conference in Gstaad, Switzerland. The Longevity Investors Conference is two full days conference is bringing together the world’s top longevity KOLs, institutional and private investors, wealthy private investors, family offices and funds. Have a look at the full agenda via this link.
Please note that this conference will not be recorded. However, if you miss out, you can follow their Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn for summaries and news from the event.