Once we developed it we’re using it in our sophisticated genetic research in order to find genes - we are testing them in the laboratory - but, this technology, the measurement of ageing from continuous signals like wearable devices, is a good trick on its own. “We developed these capabilities because we need to understand how ageing works in humans, not in mice. “Every health and wellness provider - maybe even a gym - can put into their app for example… and this thing can rank all their classes in the gym, all their systems in the gym, for their value for different kinds of users,” explains Fedichev. The carrot for the fitness providers to embed the API is to offer their users a fun and potentially valuable feature: A personalized health measurement so they can track positive (or negative) biological changes - helping them quantify the value of whatever fitness service they’re using. But the idea is to get the model widely embedded into fitness apps where it will be able to send a steady stream of longitudinal activity data back to Gero, to further feed its AI’s predictive capabilities and support the wider research mission - where it hopes to progress anti-ageing drug discovery, working in partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. Gero has recently launched a (paid, for now) API, called GeroSense, that’s aimed at health and fitness apps so they can tap up its AI modelling to offer their users an individual assessment of biological age and resilience (aka recovery rate from stress back to that individual’s baseline).Įarly partners are other longevity-focused companies, AgelessRx and Humanity Inc. It tells you - essentially - how toxic is your lifestyle… The more biological age you have relative to your chronological age years - that’s called biological acceleration - the more are your chances to get chronic disease, to get seasonal infectious diseases or also develop complications from those seasonal diseases.” But if you are going to condense human health to one number then, for a lot of people, the biological age is the best number. “We should not have illusions about that.
“Health of course is much more than one number,” emphasizes Fedichev. (The pharma company itself is not an investor).įedichev is a theoretical physicist by training who, after his PhD and some ten years in academia, moved into biotech to work on molecular modelling and machine learning for drug discovery - where he got interested in the problem of ageing and decided to start the company.Īs well as conducting its own biological research into longevity (studying mice and nematodes), it’s focused on developing an AI model for predicting the biological age and resilience to stress of humans - via sensor data captured by mobile devices.
On the pharma side, it has backing from some (unnamed) private individuals with links to Russian drug development firm, Valenta. Its investors include Belarus-based AI-focused early stage fund, Bulba Ventures (Yury Melnichek). The Singapore-based startup, which has research roots in Russia - founded back in 2015 by a Russian scientist with a background in theoretical physics - has raised a total of $5 million in seed funding to date (in two tranches).īackers come from both the biotech and the AI fields, per co-founder Peter Fedichev. A research paper Gero has had published in the peer-reviewed biomedical journal Aging explains how it trained deep neural networks to predict morbidity risk from mobile device sensor data - and was able to demonstrate that its biological age acceleration model was comparable to models based on blood test results.Īnother paper, due to be published in the journal Nature Communications later this month, will go into detail on its device-derived measurement of biological resilience.
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