Longevica

Longevica is an American biotech startup launched by former RAO UES board member and investor Alexander Chikunov and entrepreneur Ainar Abdrakhmanov. The company creates dietary supplements to increase life expectancy. Longevica develops a biotech platform for "healthy aging," which links food, toxins, the digestive system, dietary supplements, and medicines. The company has a US patent for one of the new life extension methods discovered during the study.

History

2021: Attracting $2.5 million of investments

Medical and biological company Longevica will launch an open research platform to accelerate the discovery of life extension mechanisms. This became known on November 24, 2021.

On the same day, it became known about the investment of $2.5 million in Longevica. The venture capital fund Xploration Capital has invested in a biotech startup of immigrants from Russia. According to Forbes, the developer of dietary supplements to combat aging was estimated at $25 million. The funds raised are planned to be spent on launching a research platform on which scientists will be able to test drugs against aging and access data on the effects of 1033 pharmacological drugs, the company announced.

Longevica Team

In September 2021, Longevica began selling the first three drugs in the Chinese market, said Eugene Timko of Xploration Capital. Sales in the first month of operation amounted to several tens of thousands of dollars, the startup is considering the launch of vitamin sales in other countries, but investors believe that promotion in China will be enough to achieve the scale of the company. China defends 30 times the consumption of vitamins from developed countries, he said.

Many independent laboratories have two or five candidate substances for life extension, it is expensive for them to conduct full-fledged research - it is more profitable to outsource the bio-platform. As a result, with its help, they will be able to accelerate the cycle of drug development, "Timko explains the logic of the platform.[1]

In addition to developing the platform, the funds raised are planned to be spent on integrating the research accumulated by Longevica over many years thanks to previous investments of $13 million.

With the Longevica platform, scientists and research institutes from around the world will be able to test drugs in full-scale pharmacological experiments and access a large set of research data on the effects of 1,033 pharmacological compounds. Longevica will now conduct deeper testing of the 300 most promising connections discovered by the team. This will help provide researchers with control groups and make screening trials an order of magnitude more accessible. The research will be conducted at Jackson Laboratory, a biomedical research facility.

{{quote 'If you want to understand biological aging, you must first destroy an expensive, bureaucratic and disparate model of research and create a flexible open ecosystem, "said Longevica co-founder and CEO Ainar Abrahmanov. - Our cross-cutting platform will reduce obstacles, facilitate cooperation, collection and analysis of data from experiments in the ecosystem. }}

During the study, Longevica will study more deeply a set of compounds that demonstrated life extension properties in a previous study conducted by Longevica co-founders Dr. Alexei Ryazanov and Alexander Chikunov. The three and a half year long experiment was unprecedented in its breadth and scope, the long-term effect of 1,033 pharmacological compounds on the lifespan of 20,000 long-lived mice was studied. Longevica recently received patent USA on one of the life extension methods discovered during the study.

We have already identified three particularly effective classes of compounds that have demonstrated a statistically significant effect of life extension, said Alexei Ryazanov, professor of pharmacology at Rutgers, a biochemist and molecular biologist whose discovery of alpha kinases is the foundation of Longevica's research approach. - We aim to increase the number of mice and drugs in classes to better understand the mechanisms of action of these compounds and test interventions, both individually and in combination.

The maximum life expectancy of any species is determined by the rate of aging embedded in its genes and environmental factors. There are many scientific approaches to understanding and altering the biology of aging, including genomics, cellular therapy, and toxin elimination. Unlike conventional approaches, Longevica's research focuses on the experimental study of known pharmacological compounds.

Longevica spent 11 years researching one of the most difficult problems and applied a rather simple but unique approach - testing known drugs without trying to choose a winning hypothesis in advance, "said Yevgeny Timko, co-founder and managing partner of Xploration Capital. - We believe that the greatest results are yet to come, and anticipate that the new data will lead the team to new discoveries.

We found that one of the main factors of aging is the accumulation of toxins and heavy metals in the body, "added Ainar Abrahmanov. - Our research has led to the development of a patented product that, clinically proven, blocks absorption and eliminates the accumulation of toxins in the body, leading to short-term health benefits and the long-term effect of life extension.

We believe that scientific cooperation and exchange of experimental data on our platform will contribute to breakthrough development in our field, "said Ainar Abrahmanov.

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