Venture Fund Formed to Back Longevity Research

4 Feb. 2019. A new venture capital fund is being formed to finance start-up companies developing technologies that aim to extend healthy human life spans. The Longevity Vision Fund plans to raise $100 million, mainly for early-stage investments in new biotechnology enterprises.

The fund is founded and headed by Sergey Young, a venture capital investor and partner with Bold Capital Partners in Santa Monica, California, an early-stage venture fund that collaborates with Singularity University, an entrepreneurial incubator that supports start-ups developing transformational technologies. In addition, Young is on the board of XPrize Foundation that designs and manages public challenge competitions encouraging technologies that benefit humanity. XPrize Foundation was founded by Peter Diamandis, a co-founder of Bold Capital Partners, and a collaborator with Longevity Vision Fund.

“The fund’s mission is to lead the breakthrough in human longevity and to extend human lifespan worldwide allowing people to live longer, healthier lives,” says Young in a statement from Insilico Medicine, a collaborator and supporter of Longevity Vision Fund. The fund plans to back first- and second- funding rounds of new enterprises developing therapeutics and information technologies supporting life science products and services for extending healthy human life.

Young is scheduled to describe Longevity Vision Fund today at the Longevity Leaders Conference in London, a conference discussing challenges and opportunities for longevity research and development. At the meeting, according to a separate statement from Insilico Medicine, Young is expected to note, “We must confront and change the old perception of aging, shifting focus to living a life of purpose in our later years.” Young adds, “Longevity companies help to move products into the market that we all benefit from, resulting in breakthroughs in the longevity space.”

Insilico Medicine in Rockville, Maryland is a drug discovery company using artificial intelligence to find new treatments that address problems associated with human aging. Qingsong Zhu, the company’s chief operating officer tells Science & Enterprise, Insilico is helping organize the fund, but currently has no financial stake in it.

Insilico Medicine identifies leads for new treatments from analyzing voluminous genomic, protein, and text databases with artificial intelligence or A.I. algorithms. As reported by Science & Enterprise in January 2019, Insilico is collaborating with Tara Biosystems in New York, a developer of chip devices emulating heart tissue to discover new drugs to treat aging heart muscles.

The company’s main A.I. technology uses deep learning, a form of machine learning that makes it possible to discern underlying patterns in relationships, and build those relationships into knowledge bases applied to a number of disciplines. Insilico offers as well a public online engine called aging.ai that analyzes demographic characteristics and 19 biomarkers from blood samples.

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