Where the Longevity / Aging Biotech Industry is going…
Table of Contents (this is a long email with lots of links:
- 3 takeaways from the panels
- Things Norn Group does that could be useful for you
- Ways to support Norn Group
- A few upcoming events from our friends
- Communities you may like to join
- Informational resources about the longevity field & aging biology
Information & resources don’t spread efficiently in emerging fields like ours, so signal boosting can be very high impact. As your kindergarten teacher probably taught you… sharing is caring!
A few things from the discussion I thought were particularly interesting:
- James, Kristen, and Adam feel quite strongly that the aging field needs to be more focused on getting drugs into the clinic ASAP and less focused on new technologies, platforms, and moonshots.
- The future of biology is… a return to fundamentals. Skills come and go. There’ll always be new ones to learn, but we’re still not nailing a lot of the basics.
- Placing yourself at the intersection of 2 disciplines is a great way to make yourself really useful.
Read the full email here:
https://mailchi.mp/460d5c2a53b5/our-1st-2-of-12-events-are-over?e=d5f5fe5a92
Ongoing Twitter Discussion on this topic
From the Norn Group:
Resources
- Buck Academy: The Buck Institute’s new FREE online learning platform to help even non-scientists learn about aging biology
- Introduction to the biology and landscape of Geroscience: A comprehensive primer by Martin Borch Jensen, founder of Gordian Bio & Norn Group—and former Buck postdoc—for people new to the field of aging biology. Covers the main biological mechanisms, the biotech landscape, and bottlenecks for the field.
- Norn Group’s Longevity Apprenticeship Journal Club: The journal club goes through landmark discoveries and topics in aging biology, with a focus on primary research papers. It’s intended for people who have gained familiarity with topics within aging biology and want to refine their understanding of what’s possible and what’s next. Content includes link to papers, slides from presenter, and notes from the discussion. Going through these topics chronologically you see how young the field is (a couple of decades), and how even major conference topics often arose from a single bold experiment. We read between the lines to evaluate strong claims, deduce limitations, and discuss implications.
- Norn Group’s Age-Related Diseases Overview: An overview of age-related diseases incl. data on incidence, etiology, clinical trials, animal models, and more. Since neither ‘aging’ nor lifespan are currently viable clinical endpoints, new longevity biotechnology companies face a difficult choice of picking the disease(s) best suited to test the efficacy of their drug candidates. We tried to do a lot of the research they’d need, to avoid duplication of efforts in the field.
- agingbiotech.info: This site provides concise, structured info on the aging/longevity field in the form of sortable & filterable tables to quickly give info and broad perspective. All info here is public information, with links to sources so up-to-date info or more details are only a click away. This site has information about companies, conferences, nonprofits, and more.
- senescence.info: An educational and information resource on the science of aging created and maintained by Joao Pedro de Magalhaes (he’s a very busy man working on many things, so it’s not possible for him to maintain it often, but despite that, it’s a very useful resource)
- Longevity List: Find jobs, companies, and investors in the longevity industry.
- Lifespan.io: aging research news, crowdfunding, and advocacy
- Foresight Institute’s Longevity Tech Tree: The Foresight Longevity Tech Tree is an effort to map out the longevity landscape. Eventually, it may be a very detailed plan, but for now it’s a general overview and map of connected concepts in longevity. It’s a rough but interesting tool.
- spannr.com: they cover the industry of life extension.
- Longevity Wiki: a wiki that provides open science education on healthy longevity. It’s a work in progress, so hopefully there’ll be more great content over time (if you’re interested, I think they’re open to volunteers).
- A probably outdated but also probably still useful spreadsheet of aging labs
- academiclabs.com scrapes massive amounts of data about labs, their research, and their grants and has pretty good search functionality.
- AGE presents: a series of videos produced by the American Aging Association featuring experts introducing many topics within the biology of aging.
- NUS’s Healthy Longevity Knowledge Hub: many videos about many different topics within aging science from experts
- Laura Deming’s Longevity FAQ: A beginner’s guide to longevity research