King’s College AI-Longevity Hub launched via support of Biogerontology Research Foundation

November 18, 2019, London, UK: The Biogerontology Research Foundation announces the official launch of the Longevity AI Consortium, which has been established at King’s College London with the strategic and financial support of the Biogerontology Research Foundation. The Consortium will also expand to include centers in Switzerland, Israel, Singapore and the USA through a 3-year, £7m commitment from Deep Knowledge Ventures.

King’s College London was host to the inaugural AI for Longevity Summit that took place last week as part of London Longevity Week, bringing together leaders in the longevity industry, government officials, scientists, financial and insurance industry executives under the topic of longevity for the first time. The aim of the summit was to shift from treatment of age-related illness to prevention and from traditional healthcare to AI-empowered precision health.

With older people becoming the fastest growing demographic group, the longevity industry includes products and services for those aged over 50 years of age and is becoming a multi-trillion-dollar industry. This creates both opportunities and problems for the global economy and healthcare systems.

By seeing that the use of AI in longevity research was underrepresented, Ageing Research at King’s in collaboration with industry partners, including the Biogerontology Research Foundation, Deep Knowledge Ventures and others announced the launch of the Longevity AI Consortium. The Consortium will use King’s world-leading advances in genetics, AI and ageing research to develop advanced personalised consumer and patient care.

The Consortium aims to identify novel longevity and healthy ageing biomarkers, accelerate diagnosis of age-related health decline, develop personalised physical, mental and financial health to better implement and promote effective healthy lifestyles for longevity, such as modifying patterns in sleep, nutrition, physical activity, environmental exposure and financial planning.

“AI holds enormous potential to rapidly accelerate the implementation of longevity research and development. The nation is home to multiple centres of AI for Healthcare, but not a single Longevity AI Consortium. We are changing this through our unique academic-industry focus on preventive and personalised physical, mental and financial health, marking us out from other AI and Ageing centres around the world” – Dr Richard Siow, Director of the Longevity AI Consortium at King’s College London and Ageing Research at King’s (ARK).

It was announced during the summit that the Longevity AI Accelerator hub will be based at King’s. The consortium is being established via financial and strategic support by the Biogerontology Research Foundation, and will be further developed and supported by Deep Knowledge Ventures, who will provide £7m over the next 3 years to develop a global Longevity AI network, initially UK and expanding in the coming years to Switzerland, Israel, Singapore and the USA.

“AI for Longevity is an underrepresented sector in the Longevity Industry despite having more potential to increase Healthy Longevity in the short term than any other sector. It is our aim to change that with the launch of the Longevity AI Consortium at King’s College London which, with the financial and strategic support of Deep Knowledge Ventures and the Biogerontology Research Foundation, will work to facilitate the shift from treatment to prevention and from preventive medicine to real-world precision health.” – Dmitry Kaminskiy, Managing Trustee of the Biogerontology Research Foundation, Managing Partner of Deep Knowledge Ventures, and Senior Advisor to the Longevity AI Consortium at King’s College London.

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The Biogerontology Research Foundation is the UK’s leading non-profit focused on Longevity, supporting ageing research and multiple initiatives relating to advancing Healthy Longevity and expediting the coming paradigm shift from disease treatment to personalized precision prevention. It was the main initial donor that provided financial and organisational support to Longevity International UK for the purpose of establishing the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group for Longevity, and to Ageing Research at King’s (ARK) for the purpose of establishing the Longevity AI Consortium at King’s College London. It was also actively involved in the successful initiative of adding a new extension code for “ageing-related diseases” accepted in 2018 by the World Health Organization during the last revisions of its International Classification of Diseases framework.

The Longevity AI Consortium established by Ageing Research at King’s (ARK), will serve as a leading academic-industry R&D hub for AI-driven personalised and preventive diagnostics, prognostics and therapeutics. The advances in genetics, artificial intelligence and the growing availability of health data present an opportunity to develop advanced personalised consumer and patient care. The aims of the Longevity AI Consortium include the identification of novel longevity and healthy ageing biomarkers, accelerated diagnosis of age-related health decline, with increased accuracy, refining demographic and clinical methods to facilitate recruitment, retention and ongoing reappraisal, the development of personalised physical, mental and financial health and longevity to better implement and promote effective healthy lifestyles for longevity, such as modifying patterns in sleep, nutrition, physical activity, environmental exposure and financial planning.

Deep Knowledge Group is a consortium of commercial and non-profit organizations active on many fronts in the realm of DeepTech and Frontier Technologies (AI, Longevity, FinTech, GovTech, InvestTech), ranging from scientific research to investment, entrepreneurship, media, analytics and more. Its subsidiaries and associated organisations include Deep Knowledge Ventures, Longevity.Capital, AI-Pharma.Capital, Longevity FinTech Company, Deep Knowledge Analytics, Aging Analytics Agency, the Biogerontology Research Foundation, Longevity Swiss Foundation, Longevity International UK – Secretariat for the UK All-Party Parliamentary on Longevity, and AI-Longevity Consortium at King’s College London.