Beyond Longevity

xercise in a Pill? How Muscle Could Protect Memory, with Professor Constanza J Cortes

Episode Summary

Could your body get some of the benefits of a workout without you doing the exercise? And could a drug like that help prevent memory loss or treat Alzheimer’s?

Host Daphna Stern speaks with Professor Constanza J Cortes, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, about how exercise could help preserve memory as we age. Professor Cortes’ goal is to develop treatments for people who cannot exercise enough because of p...

Everyone talks about living longer. Far fewer people ask what happens if we reach those extra decades without purpose, identity, relevance or a clear idea of what we actually want to do with them.

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, I speak with Paul Long, a third-generation storyteller, former major-market television reporter, anchor and special projects producer, and Emmy-winning content creator. He went on to run his own production company before making a major pivot in his own life.

Paul now runs New Way Forward, a platform helping people rethink the...

Why do we lose muscle as we age, and how much can we rebuild, even in our seventies? For Dr Oskar Wenbar, the interest began after a stroke left his father bedridden. Watching his father’s physical condition deteriorate and his confidence disappear drew him into research on ageing muscle.

In this episode, we look at what changes inside our muscles as we age, why it matters far beyond strength, and how much can be regained.

We then move into more contested territory: testosterone replacement therapy and hormone optimisation, the muscle people may lose on GL...

65 billion dollars. That is roughly what Nebius was worth on the stock market when we recorded this episode. Yet most people have never heard of it. So what does the company actually do, and why are scientists using its computing power to search for new treatments?

Dr Ilya Burkov, Global Head of Scientific AI and Healthcare at Nebius, joins Beyond Longevity to explain how AI is being used in research and what happens behind the scenes when a biotech company needs far more computing power than it has in its own lab. Ilya has a PhD in...

Longevity medicine has created a strange new kind of patient: the healthy person convinced something must be wrong.

A wearable flags poor recovery. One test says your body is ageing faster than it should. Another gives you a completely different answer. And suddenly, someone who felt perfectly well starts wondering what needs fixing.

In this episode, host Daphna Stern sits down with Dr Chris Bachtsetzis, a physician practising general, preventive and longevity medicine in Switzerland.

Dr Chris sees patients across the full spectrum. Some have virtually unlimited budgets and are prepared to spend...

At 16, Chris Mirabile was lying in a hospital bed the night before brain surgery, wondering whether he would wake up the next morning. Years later, as he was building NOVOS, he lost his mother to pancreatic cancer. Those two experiences reshaped the way he thought about health and ageing, and eventually led him to found a longevity company built around a simple but demanding question: can we actually prove that what we are doing to slow ageing works?

In this conversation, Chris Mirabile, Founder and CEO of NOVOS, takes us through the science of the 12 hallmarks of...

Recorded at HLTH Europe in Amsterdam, Part Two of our special series looks at four very different ways technology could help healthcare move earlier, become more personalised and make better use of the growing amount of health data we are collecting.

Dr Marta Ciechonska, Co-Founder and CEO of Salient Bio, explores what the microbes living in our gut, mouth and vaginal microbiome can tell us about health. She explains how metagenomic testing and machine learning are being used to move microbiome science towards clinical diagnostics, including work in inflammatory bowel disease, as well as the links between...

What happens when technology stops simply tracking our health and starts helping us understand what to do about it?

Recorded at HLTH Europe in Amsterdam, this episode of Beyond Longevity features three conversations with founders working across very different areas of health technology. From understanding our individual stress response and making sense of an overwhelming amount of health data, to bringing rehabilitation into the home, these conversations explore what preventive health could actually look like in practice.

Timothée Manschot, Founder and CEO of NOWATCH, is rethinking what a health wearable s...

What if a vaccine could help the immune system clear senescent “zombie” cells — damaged cells linked to ageing, chronic inflammation and age-related disease?

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Daphna Stern sits down with David Scieszka, PhD, MBA, a biomedical scientist, computational biologist, and Founder and CEO of Vertical Longevity Pharmaceuticals (VeLo Pharma). His route into longevity has been anything but conventional, spanning service in the US Army, wet-lab science, computational biology and, eventually, biotech entrepreneurship.

VeLo Pharma is developing a senolytic vaccine designed to help the immune system recognise and remove senescent cells. Often descri...

What if heart disease, kidney disease and dementia share a common mechanism linked to ageing? And what if blocking a destructive form of cell death called necrosis could help protect several organs at once?

In this episode, host Daphna Stern speaks with LinkGevity founders Dr Carina Kern and Serena Kern-Libera about their attempt to develop a new longevity drug targeting necrosis, ageing and age-related disease.

Their work challenges the conventional model of drug discovery. Medicine generally treats kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and dementia as separate conditions. LinkGevity is asking whether targeting...

At 39, Leslie Kenny was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and says she was told she had around five years to live. More than two decades later, she is in long-term remission and has turned that experience into a mission: helping patients become better informed, more involved and more confident in decisions about their own health.

In this episode, Leslie Kenny, founder of Oxford Healthspan and co-founder of the Oxford Longevity Project, joins Daphna Stern to tell the story of how she challenged her original prognosis, found intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) through her own research, changed her diet...

Nearly two decades ago, Dr Gil Blander was trying to convince investors of an idea that, at the time, sounded radical: blood biomarkers should not only be used to diagnose disease, but to help healthy people understand what to change before disease develops.

Some thought he was crazy.

That idea became InsideTracker, the company he founded 17 years ago, which brings together blood biomarkers, genetic information and wearable data to give people personalised recommendations for improving their health.

In this conversation, Dr Blander traces the scientific journey that...

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Daphna speaks with Dr Peter Scriven, Co-Founder and Clinical & Scientific Director of LONGEVITY, about what longevity medicine should actually look like: moving from reactive, disease-led healthcare towards preventative, personalised medicine that tracks biomarkers, cardiovascular risk and health trajectory over time.

Dr Peter describes much of conventional healthcare as ‘failure-based medicine’ — a system designed to respond once something has gone wrong. He questions the reliance on population-based ‘normal’ laboratory ranges, which can obscure meaningful changes within an individual, and makes the case for longitudinal ‘human telemetry’: following biomarkers and other health data over time rath...

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Daphna speaks with Jody Tropeano Greene, Head of Content at HLTH, and Alexa Mikhail, Senior Content Lead at HLTH US, about how HLTH identifies the healthcare topics that matter most, balances emerging trends with scientific evidence, and reflects the growing importance of longevity within modern healthcare.

They explore the difference between healthy ageing—grounded in well-established principles such as sleep, nutrition, exercise, stress management and social connection—and the consumer longevity movement, where interventions are often expensive, and the supporting evidence is still evolving.

The conversation examines the gap betw...

On Beyond Longevity, host Daphna speaks with Dr Sundeep Dugar, PhD, co-founder of BlueOakNx and the scientists behind the blockbuster cholesterol medicines Zetia (ezetimibe) and Vytorin. He explains how Zetia transformed cholesterol treatment by blocking cholesterol absorption in the intestine, and reflects on what it really takes to discover a breakthrough medicine: collaboration, perseverance, intellectual honesty, and the willingness to follow the data despite constant uncertainty.

Dr Sundeep discusses why artificial intelligence is set to transform drug discovery by accelerating analysis and identifying patterns that humans might miss, while arguing that it cannot replace scientific judgment or...

Daphna sat down with Robert Gielow, founder of Mentry Pharma, to discuss what it really takes for foreign supplement and longevity companies to enter the pharmacy markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He explains why many brands misunderstand the German-speaking market: distribution and pharmacy listings alone do not create demand, pharmacies are not straightforward sales channels, and sceptical consumers require multiple trust-building touchpoints before making a purchase.

The conversation explores the practical realities of regulation, market access and enforcement, the differences between brick-and-mortar and online pharmacies, and why many market entries fail when companies focus on sales...

Biology is undergoing one of the biggest transformations in its history. AI is helping researchers analyse enormous datasets, predict protein structures, identify drug targets, and accelerate scientific discovery in ways that would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago. But AI is not replacing scientists. If anything, it is making human expertise, judgement, and scientific rigour more important than ever.

In this conversation, we explore how the way science is done is changing. We discuss why so many promising discoveries never reach patients, why stronger collaboration between academia and industry matters, how breakthroughs such...

Beyond Longevity interviews Kyle Holbert, COO and co-founder of Longevity Centres of America, about how unexplained fatigue, brain fog, depression, anxiety, joint pain and gut issues derailed his health despite a healthy lifestyle and years of searching for answers.

After seeing multiple GPs and therapists who either dismissed his symptoms or could not identify a cause, Kyle discovered he had severely low testosterone. Treatment with HCG led to a rapid improvement in his mental health and highlighted some of the limitations of time-constrained, symptom-focused healthcare.

When other symptoms persisted, he turned to biohacking and concierge...

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Daphna speaks with Nikolina Lauc, CEO and co-founder of GlycanAge, about glycobiology, immune ageing, and the role of chronic inflammation in ageing.

Nikolina explains why glycans, the complex sugar structures attached to our antibodies, may offer one of the clearest windows into the state of the immune system. The conversation explores “inflammaging”, the idea that chronic, low-grade inflammation may not simply be a consequence of ageing, but one of the forces actively driving it.

They discuss why antibody glycans may capture biological risk earlier than routine markers such as CRP...

Daphna sat down with Alan Graves, founder of DoNotAge, for an in-depth conversation about what it takes to make longevity science more credible, more collaborative and more accessible.

After a serious health decline in his late twenties, Alan entered the longevity field after learning that ageing may be more malleable than he had once thought. He went on to build DoNotAge as a self-funded health research organisation, using consumer supplements to help fund ageing research, support external labs and emerging researchers, provide high-purity ingredients for independent studies, and translate complex science into language people can actually understand.<...

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Daphna speaks with Dr David Cox, a health journalist (BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, NBC News and others), who holds a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Age Code, about how diet, ultra-processed foods and the modern food environment shape biological ageing.

Dr David argues that the longevity conversation often focuses too heavily on future drug breakthroughs, supplements and biohacking, while overlooking lower-hanging fruit that could already have a meaningful impact on long-term health. He explains why reducing ultra-processed foods, increasing fibre intake...

Supplements promise a lot: mitochondrial support, better brain health, healthier gut function, anti-ageing benefits and more.

But how much of that is real science, and how much is simply clever wording on a label?

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Dr Luke Bucci, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Juvenon, brings both a scientist’s eye and decades of experience in the supplement industry to one of the most confusing areas of longevity.

Dr Luke explains the difference between a product being described as “science-backed” and one that is supported by meaningful human clinical eviden...

This week on Beyond Longevity, I am joined by Dr Herna de Wit, CEO and Founder of Omnisci Consulting, with a PhD in Biochemistry and an LLB in Law.

Dr Herna brings a very unusual and valuable combination to the longevity conversation: deep scientific training, legal expertise and hands-on experience advising companies in the health, biotech and longevity space.

Longevity is full of exciting science, but it is also a field where marketing can move faster than evidence. In this episode, we ask a simple but important question: how do we separate what is genuinely...

On Beyond Longevity, Dr Filippo Ongaro, medical doctor, entrepreneur, and strategic advisor, shares how nearly eight years working with astronauts at the European Space Agency shaped the way he thinks about ageing.

In space, the body can lose muscle, bone and resilience at a frightening speed. Stress, sleep disruption, nutrition, movement and circadian misalignment are not lifestyle details. They become central medical issues. For Dr Filippo, space became a kind of accelerated ageing model, showing in fast-forward what happens when the systems that keep us strong begin to break down, and why exercise and nutrition are such...

Michael A. Clinton, former President of Hearst Magazines.

Michael spent four decades at the top of the publishing world, including as President and Publishing Director of Hearst Magazines, before turning his attention to one of the biggest questions of our time. If many of us are likely to live longer than previous generations, how do we make the second half of life not just longer, but more intentional, productive and meaningful?

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Michael discusses the ideas behind his book ROAR and his framework for rethinking later life. ROAR...

What does good prevention actually look like, and is the longevity industry helping people live better, or simply making health feel more complicated?

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Daphna speaks with Niko Hems, Operations Lead at YEARS, a longevity clinic in Berlin, Germany.

Niko brings a rare perspective to the conversation. He works inside the longevity field, but he is not afraid to challenge it. He believes deeply in prevention, yet he is sharply aware of where the industry can go wrong, from over-testing and over-promising to fringe science and...

In this ViVE conference bonus episode of Beyond Longevity, recorded live at the ViVE event in Los Angeles, the conversation explores how BioAro is seeking to bring different strands of personalised health data together within a single longevity platform.

Brock Hay explains BioAro’s approach to integrating genomics, microbiome testing, biomarker analysis, AI-driven interpretation, and personalized supplementation. The central idea is that health and longevity cannot be understood through any single test alone, but require a broader and more connected picture of the individual.

The conversation also examines one of the most important questions in mo...

On Beyond Longevity, Corinne Briaud Manon discusses women’s healthspan through the lenses of science, consumer trust and commercial execution, drawing on her experience in major corporates and her work across Green Marlin, which advises health and longevity startups, and LongHER, a women’s healthspan community platform.

She explains how the two initiatives connect, including how startups can test their propositions with real consumers, and outlines common early-stage pitfalls such as focusing too much on technical detail and not enough on real consumer need, lacking competitive awareness and structure, and letting passion override business discipline.

The...

Professor Lorna Harries has spent more than two decades studying why cells age and what might be done about it. In this episode, she explains one of the most overlooked mechanisms in ageing biology, RNA splicing. When cells lose control of this process, they become stressed, dysfunctional and can tip into senescence, a state that contributes to ageing across almost every organ system.

She explains what senescent cells actually do, how the signals they release can spread damage from one tissue to another, and why calling them “zombie cells” does not come close to telling the full stor...

Recorded at the 2026 VIVE conference in Los Angeles, this Beyond Longevity mini-series episode features Mark Zemel, co-founder and CEO of Retia Medical, discussing the company’s hemodynamic monitoring technology that turns continuous bedside physiological signals into real-time clinical insights for high-risk surgery and critical care.

Marc explains Retia’s aim to detect early deterioration, guide diagnosis and therapy, and avoid the unreliability, invasiveness and complexity of older tools, noting deployment in 75 US hospitals and distribution via Medtronic, plus presence in 18 countries.

He highlights FDA clearance for Argos Infinity enterprise software, which extends insights across the hosp...

This week’s guest is Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Avivah advises leaders on gender and generational balance, the future of work, and the longevity economy. She hosts the podcast 4-Quarter Lives, publishes the Substack Elderberries, and writes regularly for Forbes and Harvard Business Review. She is Visiting Faculty at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, co-directs the Longevity Leadership Programme at Católica Lisbon, and has given three TED Talks.

In this episode, Avivah and Daphna explore how longer lives are reshaping work, business, and society. Avivah argues that longevity is not just a health story but a stru...

In this episode, Dr Jin-Xiong She, a scientist with more than 400 publications, over 20,000 citations, and more than $100 million in research funding, explains why he left the top tier of academic medicine to pursue something more urgent: finding better ways to detect decline early and protect healthspan before disease takes hold. He shares what nearly 100,000 NAD tests have uncovered and why he believes biomarker baselines could change the way we think about prevention.

https://www.jinfiniti.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@ProfJinShe

In this episode:

00:00 Welcome and Guest...

What does it take to turn longevity science into real-world policy? In this episode, Daphna speaks with Dr Ilia Stambler, historian of longevity, published author, Chair of the International Longevity Alliance (ILA), and Chief Science Officer and Chairman of Vetek (Seniority) Association, about why advocacy and ecosystem-building may be just as important as the science itself.

Dr Stambler shares how the ILA has grown into a global network connecting 76 nonprofits across 66 countries, organising international conferences, and running the annual Longevity Day (1st October) and Longevity Month (October) campaigns. He points to concrete wins, including efforts to support...

In this episode, Daphna sits down with Elio, co-founder of LongevAI, a platform using artificial intelligence to help longevity clinics analyse biomarker data, streamline documentation, and build personalised client plans.

With a background in computer science and a lifelong passion for health optimisation, Elio offers a grounded, honest perspective on what AI in longevity medicine can do today, and where the limits still lie.

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What We Cover

• How LongevAI was founded and what problem it solves for longevity clinics

• What it means to automate clinical documentation without removing the clin...

Dr Bradley Elliott — physiologist, university lecturer, and a trustee and Communications Lead at the British Society for Research on Ageing — joins host Daphna for a refreshingly honest conversation about what longevity science actually knows and what we still cannot explain.

This episode cuts through the certainty. We talk about biomarkers and biological age, why many measurements may be tracking effects rather than causes, we discuss extracellular vesicles and the surprising limit of science. Dr Bradley discusses some of his papers and related research, and our conversation challenges much of the conventional wisdom in the longevity space.

Wh...

In this episode, I sit down with Dr Brendan Khong, a London-based aesthetic physician and regenerative medicine advocate, for a practical conversation about what it really means to age well, starting with the skin, but quickly expanding into whole-body biology.

The central theme is a shift now reshaping aesthetic medicine: moving away from surface-level fixes and toward addressing the underlying drivers of visible ageing. A key driver, Dr Brendan explains, is inflammaging, a chronic, low-grade inflammation that builds over time and accelerates both skin ageing and broader physiological decline.

He breaks down why some conventional...

What happens to your financial plan when you live to 100?

Most pension systems were built around an ~80-year life expectancy. Much of today’s financial advice still follows a linear life-stage model. And many businesses have not yet reckoned with the fact that both their customers and their workforce are ageing in ways that will reshape everything.

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, I am joined by Nadine Esposito, founder of Wellthspan Advisory and a senior risk management professional, to unpack why longer lifespans are not just a medical story — they are a planning and fina...

What can a tiny worm tell us about human ageing, and could gut bacteria hold the key to a longer, healthier life?

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, we sit down with Professor David Weinkove: Chair of the British Society for Research on Ageing (BSRA), Professor at Durham University, and Co-founder and CSO of Magnitude Biosciences. David's lab uses the short-lived nematode C. elegans to run fast, rigorous experiments looking for interventions that extend healthspan and lifespan, and the results are pointing in some surprising directions.

We cover how Prof David moved from physics into...

What if the conditions we treat in our fifties and sixties which were set in motion decades earlier, would have been spotted, and shifted, far sooner?

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, I sit down with Dr Mayoni Gooneratne, Founder and Medical Director of Human Health and Skin Fit Clinics, and Vice President of the British College of Functional Medicine. After years as an NHS colorectal and pelvic floor surgeon treating advanced disease, she made a decisive pivot into functional and preventative medicine with a sharp focus on women’s midlife health.

...

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, I am joined by Dr Angus Perry, a practising GP, clinical AI builder, and performance-medicine enthusiast with experience supporting Formula One teams and elite athletes. Dr Angus is focused on closing the gap between what preventive medicine can achieve and what is realistic inside a ten-minute GP appointment.

He shares the path that led him here: a childhood ambition to become a GP, an early pull toward technology, and a personal family experience with chronic disease that clarified why the current model is failing both clinicians and patients. We talk candidly...