Beyond Longevity

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 GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, peptides, NMN, and whether biological-age tests tell us anything useful. Where is there good evidence to act, and where are we getting ahead of it? About the guest Dr Oskar Wenbar is a UK-based pharmacist and researcher whose PhD work at the University of East Anglia focused on skeletal muscle ageing. Born in Poland and raised in Chicago, he studied pharmacy in England and worked as a hospital pharmacist before moving into research. He is a co-founder of Evaro, a digital healthcare company that has served more than two million patients across the UK through online consultations and prescription treatments. Links and resources Evaro Evaro bios Dr Oskar Wenbar on LinkedIn Tasso 00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro 01:45 Oscar’s Journey to Longevity 05:42 Inside Ageing Muscle 08:49 Satellite Cells Explained 11:39 Why Muscle Loss Matters 15:33 Can You Rebuild Muscle 16:30 Training and Protein Uptake 19:47 Fast Twitch Fibres and Falls 20:54 DHT Testosterone and Muscle 23:08 From Mice to Human Evidence 24:43 Testosterone Decline Basics 27:06 Deficiency vs Optimization Debate 29:41 Stigma and Safety Evidence 31:02 UK vs US Testosterone Culture 33:54 Muscle Response and GLP-1 Risks 36:05 Peptides Hype Explained 38:12 NMN and NAD Boosters 39:36 Biological Age and Blood Testing 40:48 Needle-Free Blood Draw Devices 43:34 Longevity Basics and Essential Labs 45:51 Rapid Fire and Final Takeaways

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 medicine and worked in medical research before moving into technology at Amazon Web Services. He joined Nebius in 2024. We talk about the difference between asking ChatGPT a question and using AI to investigate a potential drug. Ilya explains why access to computing power matters, what Nebius provides to research teams and large companies, and why a calculation that takes two days on a lab’s own equipment could take just 23 minutes with more powerful computing. We also discuss AlphaFold, the protection of research data and intellectual property, and the limits of AI in drug discovery. If AI points scientists towards a promising molecule but cannot explain why it chose it, has it made a discovery? And could the same tools help us understand something as complicated as ageing? Nebius Cloud for Scientific AI and Healthcare: https://nebius.com/solutions/life-sciences-and-healthcare Dr Ilya Burkov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyaburkov/ 00:00 Can AI Discover Without Understanding? 00:55 Meet Dr Ilya Burkov 02:08 Can AI Speed Up Scientific Research? 03:47 Why Did Dr Ilya Move from the Lab into Technology? 06:06 How Is Scientific AI Different from ChatGPT? 08:55 What Does AI Drug Discovery Actually Mean? 11:36 Why Do Biotech Investors Ask About Computing Power? 13:04 What Does Nebius Actually Do? 16:36 Does Nebius Provide the Kitchen or Help with the Cooking? 18:02 Why Does Biotech Need a Specialist AI Cloud? 20:48 How Are Researchers Using Nebius in Practice? 32:25 How Are Data and IP Protected in the Cloud? 33:47 What Did AlphaFold Change About Protein Folding? 37:43 Does AI Understand What It Discovers? 39:30 Is Ageing Perfect for AI or a Complete Nightmare? 44:35 How Do Europe, the US and Asia Regulate AI? 47:57 Why Are Companies Reserving Computing Power Early? 49:59 Rapid-Fire Questions 52:52 Closing Takeaways

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 heavily on their health, travelling between clinics and trying the latest tests and treatments. Others simply want to stay healthy for as long as possible. And when it comes to those with money to spend, Dr Chris is often the person telling them to do less. The conversation gets into where more testing becomes more noise, why Dr Chris questions the precision of biological age testing, and why he believes the enthusiasm around NAD+ has moved faster than the evidence. Daphna also challenges him on a more fundamental question: what does a longevity doctor actually offer that a very good GP should not already be doing? They also explore what happens when the pursuit of better health goes too far. Can constantly tracking biomarkers and wearable scores turn a healthy person into an anxious patient? And if money really is no object, should you actually be doing more? This is a conversation about how far to go in the pursuit of better health, and why knowing when to stop can matter as much as knowing what to do. Guest Bio Dr Chris Bachtsetzis is a physician based in Switzerland specialising in general, preventive and longevity medicine. He has a background in biomedical sciences alongside his medical degree, with additional academic training in economics, business management and political science, as well as experience as a healthcare adviser with the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care. Before medicine, Dr Chris was an athlete and personal trainer, an experience that continues to shape his emphasis on fitness and human performance. His career has since spanned clinical medicine, research, healthcare management and public health, and he has practised preventive and longevity medicine across several countries. In Switzerland, Dr Chris has worked with the Chenot Group, The Kusnacht Practice and Longevity Centre Switzerland. He now practises general, preventive and longevity medicine in the Canton of Zurich, working with patients ranging from high-performing executives and professional athletes to everyday people looking for a more proactive approach to healthy ageing. His guiding philosophy is “Prevention and Longevity for All”: maximise healthspan through prevention and lifestyle first, use proven medical interventions when indicated, approach emerging tests, treatments and technologies critically, and make effective longevity care accessible to all. Where to Find Dr Chris Bachtsetzis Website: drchrismd.com 00:00 Welcome and Premise 02:04 Meet Dr Chris 05:29 Longevity in Switzerland 09:34 Longevity vs GP Care 14:31 Insurance and Costs 16:03 Who Seeks Longevity 18:51 Is Longevity for Rich 22:03 Hype and NAD Plus 26:48 Biological Age Reality 32:43 Wearables and Anxiety 39:42 Choosing Tests and Tools 47:56 What to Do at 50 54:16 Rapid Fire and Wrap 58:28 Key Takeaways Outro

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 ageing and explains why NOVOS is trying to tackle all 12 at once rather than focusing on a single pathway. We also get into a less obvious problem: ingredients that look promising individually do not necessarily behave the same way when combined. It is one of the reasons Chris believes longevity products should be tested as complete formulations, rather than relying only on evidence for their individual components. We then look at the animal and human research behind NOVOS Core, including its cardiovascular study in healthy adults. We also discuss the science — and marketing — behind Face Age, and Chris’s take on some of the biggest claims, controversies and myths currently circulating in the longevity space. Guest information Chris Mirabile — Founder and CEO, NOVOS Chris survived a brain tumour diagnosis and surgery at 16, went on to study finance, accounting and international business at NYU Stern, and won NYU Stern’s Business Plan Competition before co-founding Hotlist, an early social planning network that reached more than 220 million social plans. He later founded NOVOS, a longevity company structured as a Public Benefit Corporation, donating a portion of its profits and equity to nonprofit organisations supporting ageing research. NOVOS assembled a scientific advisory board that includes Harvard Medical School professor George Church. Its Head of R&D, Dr Diogo Barardo, created DrugAge, one of the world’s largest databases of compounds studied for their effects on lifespan in model organisms. Links & References * NOVOS: https://novoslabs.com/ * The Science Behind NOVOS Core: https://learn.novoslabs.com/ * NOVOS Core Cardiovascular Research: https://learn.novoslabs.com/cardiovascular * University of Surrey NOVOS Core Study — SSRN Preprint: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6241278 * NOVOS Core: https://novoslabs.com/product/novos-core/ * Chris Mirabile on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slowmyage Chapters 00:00 Podcast introduction and guest 02:11 The experiences that changed how Chris thinks about health 02:52 A brain tumour at 16 06:50 From finance to startup founder 09:51 What does longevity actually mean? 12:40 Going upstream — the 12 hallmarks of ageing 17:34 Self-experimentation, data and discovering PubMed 21:18 Why Chris believed NOVOS needed to exist 23:17 Bringing leading scientists on board 29:09 Why target all 12 hallmarks at once? 33:35 Choosing the ingredients for NOVOS Core 36:47 Why the complete formula needs to be tested 40:25 NOVOS Core and lifespan in aged mice 41:04 Moving into human trials 42:00 What the cardiovascular study measured 43:47 Why start with heart and blood vessel health? 45:21 What happened after a single dose? 46:25 The results after six months 49:19 Can you make an already healthy person healthier? 51:58 FaceAge — science, marketing and biological age 56:28 NOVOS Life, wearables and AI 58:07 What longevity advice are people getting wrong? 01:03:04 Sleep, cholesterol and Chris’s CAC scan 01:08:48 Rapid fire 01:12:30 The longevity myth Chris does not believe

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 oral health, systemic inflammation and changes associated with menopause. Ilay Marom, Co-Founder and COO of NaNose Medical, introduces a very different approach to early detection: analysing biomarkers in our breath. He explains how nanosensors and AI can identify patterns associated with diseases including lung cancer and advanced liver fibrosis, what the technology is actually measuring, how accurate it could become and whether breath testing could eventually make large-scale screening more accessible and affordable. Aad R. Liefveld, Chief Growth Officer at PACE Clinical, tackles a problem that has little to do with discovering new treatments and everything to do with whether patients actually follow them. We discuss why people struggle with adherence, how behavioural modelling can identify patients at risk of dropping out or deviating from treatment protocols, and why poor adherence can distort the results of clinical trials themselves. Finally, Ruth Prieto of Nebius takes us behind the scenes of medical AI. We discuss the computing infrastructure required to power increasingly complex healthcare applications, from drug discovery to diagnostics, alongside the questions around privacy, security, regulation and what meaningful AI adoption in healthcare actually looks like. Together, the conversations raise a broader question running through much of HLTH Europe: can we use technology not simply to collect more health data, but to detect problems earlier, intervene more intelligently and ultimately keep people healthier for longer? Marta Ciechonska - Salient Bio https://www.linkedin.com/in/marta-ciechonska/ Salient Bio Ilay Marom - Co-Founder & COO at Nanose Medical https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilay-marom-846793218/ Nanose Medical - Nanose -Disease diagnosis - Official Website Adriaan Rudolf (Aad) Liefveld - https://www.linkedin.com/in/liefveld/ https://www.paceclinical.com/ Ruth Prieto - Communications Manager and External Communications PR lead at Nebius https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-prieto/ The Ultimate AI Cloud Find out about HLTH Europe https://hlth.com/events/europe/ See you there next year Running order 00:00 Back at HLTH Europe 01:49 Microbiome Diagnostics 05:24 From Testing to Prevention 08:28 Breath Biomarkers for Earlier Detection 11:18 How Breath Sensing Works 15:50 Accuracy, Cost and Accessibility 18:05 Scaling Preventive Diagnostics 23:30 Why Patients Struggle With Adherence 28:50 The Behaviour Behind Non-Adherence 30:14 B-COMPASS and Proactive Support 31:08 The Clinical Trial Dropout Problem 32:03 How Protocol Deviations Distort Data 34:16 Rethinking Clinical Trials and R&D 37:56 Who Should Pay for Better Adherence? 40:46 Making Health Technology Accessible as We Age 42:37 The Infrastructure Behind Medical AI 46:37 How AI Is Changing Drug Discovery 47:41 Privacy, Security and Real-World AI 49:58 Breakthrough Projects and Recognition 55:33 Closing Reflections