Rejuve Biotech is combining advanced AI with data from Methuselah flies to develop therapeutics that target aging and age-related disease.
Longevity focused biotechnology startup Rejuve Biotech is using AI and data from long-lived animal models to develop novel therapeutics designed to help people live longer and healthier. The company holds exclusive rights to the data from so-called Methuselah flies – long-lived fruit flies that have been specifically bred for remarkable longevity.
Rejuve.Bio believes that combining this data with crowdsourced human data sets and “neural-symbolic” AI will enable it to quickly develop “effective healthspan-enhancing and aging-related disease mitigating products.”
Longevity.Technology: Rejuve.Bio operates within the SingularityNET ecosystem, an organization on a mission to create an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that is “decentralized, democratic, inclusive, and beneficial.” Founded by Dr Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET acts like an incubator to companies like Rejuve.Bio, providing guidance, funding and expertise. To learn more about how Rejuve.Bio aims to crack the longevity code, we spoke to the company’s CEO, Kennedy Schaal.
The Methuselah fly data on which Rejuve.Bio is founded is the culmination of a fascinating project, started more than 40 years ago by UC Irvine professor Michael Rose.
“Normal lifespan for a fruit fly is about five to six weeks,” says Schaal. “By selectively breeding the flies for increased longevity – taking the eggs of the longest-lived flies for the next generation, over thousands of generations – they got the flies up to about a 12-week lifespan.”
‘No limit’ to fly lifespan
In 2008, while she was working for longevity genomics company Genescient, Schaal took ownership of the Methuselah flies and has continued to selectively breed them.
“I now have a stock of Methuselah flies that are on a six-month generation cycle – maxing out at about eight months lifespan today,” she says. “I’m continuing to select them every generation. It’s a slower process now, because they only have two generations a year, but their lifespan continues to increase. It appears there really is no limit to expanding the lifespan of these flies.”
Between 2006 and 2010, Genescient conducted AI analyses of gene expression and sequences in Methuselah flies, compared with data from corresponding “wild-type” control flies. The work provided key insights into the genetic networks relevant to longevity, as well as cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, and other age-associated diseases. Cross-linking this information with drug databases provided lists of substances that could target key parts of the biological networks related to age-related diseases.
“What’s great about fruit flies is they share about 60 to 70% of their genome with us,” says Schaal. “And the mechanisms by which they age are particularly similar to ours, so they’re a really great model organism, and they’re also very economical to study.”