The Time Bank: Reversing Human Aging

While traditional labs offer a snapshot of current health, Generation Lab is pushing the frontier by measuring how fast you are aging at a cellular level. In this session, Alex Plant dives into the science of epigenetic testing and how biological age markers provide a powerful roadmap for lifestyle intervention.

• Presenter: Alex Plant, Head of Growth at Generation Lab
• Key Themes: Cellular aging, epigenetic roadmap, and measuring the effectiveness of interventions.

Click here to see the full replay page and access all sessions from the DTC Lab Testing Summit.

Watch the Replay

The Time Bank: Reversing Human Aging:

Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Alex, it’s great to see you.

Alex: Nice to see you.

Dr. Sandi: Hi. Yeah. We met at A4M in person, that big show in Las Vegas. So, I’m going to let our participants know about you. The head of growth at Generation Lab, where you lead go-to-market strategies for the company’s biological age diagnostic platform, now the standard for longevity testing across over 300 clinics and 1,000 physician networks…over 1,000. You are an expert in longevity and health span optimization. So, take it away, Alex. I’m so excited for this presentation.

Alex: I’m so excited as well. And thank you so much for having me. I think your organization does such great work. And the timeliness for your organization to exist and thrive, and the trends that we’re seeing are just so well positioned, I would say. I’ve been following the space for a number of years. And I’d say that we’ll go into a bit about how we view the market, what we offer. But I think at the top line, what I’m most excited about is that I think people are waking up to the power of preventative care. They’re waking up to the ability to use data and information to make informed decisions all in service of really helping to extend those healthy years. And I think more people are waking up to the power of this kind of mindset.

I will go through this kind of presentation. I’m Alex with Generation Lab. I’ll go into a bit about the company, but we’ve been around for three years. And as Sandra was saying, we’re the fastest growing in our space, but we’re really grounded in science. We’re from the UC Berkeley Longevity Lab. But I wanted to take us up a notch. So, something that we can all relate to, this concept that as the average human health span in lifespan, depending on where you live, some variation, but we all get about 30,000 days. And so, thinking about how we use that time, how we preserve that time, and how do we add to our own time bank, if you will.

Now, unfortunately, these are examples of people that some of the titans of industry and entertainment, and that unfortunately, some of the most notable people left us way too early. And I think it’s a good example to show that within each of our cells, we bring our own genetic predisposition. Our own lifestyle choices, lifestyle, environment, stress. And unfortunately, in each of these instances, there was something lurking in each of these folks that ultimately shortened their health span, which is a real bummer here. I think, hopefully, as we move forward and think about longevity and extending those health spans, how can we learn, and how can we move forward?

As folks that are practitioners or people covering this space, I think everyone will understand the concept of traditional medicine. This is why we’ve all gotten into this, has a lot of shortcomings. There’s a lot of limitations, and it’s not designed for optimization. It’s not designed for any sort of extending health span at all. It really is set up in a way which is for failure, unfortunately. Aging, and we’ll talk about this, that aging is a biomarker for a disease, diseases go untreated, and they lead to extra, extra costs that we know.

So, traditional medicine has really a lot of shortcomings in terms of its approach to fighting fires, waiting for a symptom to happen. We’re not set up in a way. And it’s quite costly, and expensive, and prohibitive, and it doesn’t reach all people. And we know this studying it at the UC Berkeley Lab, and our decades of regenerative medicine science, that aging and understanding aging can drive 90% of your disease risk. The other element is the kind of genetic predisposition, but the tie that binds here is that there are levers that we can pull that are helping to understand how we age, and then how to reverse that.

We’ll ask questions at the end. And our philosophy here at Generation Lab is really waking up to the power of measurement. I was very excited when I started to… I’ve been in this industry for about three years. When I first started…I just turned 50 last year, and I think I thought that most of the appetite for a regenerative medicine and a proactive approach to healthcare would have been my age and older. Fifty is kind of that second half of your life where you need to start getting serious about your health, etc. What I’m really excited to report is that the market for our own product, and we’ll talk about that, actually it’s much wider than just that demographic. It’s 8 people in their 20s, mid 20s, all the way up to late 80s and 90s.

I think the tie that binds here is that people are waking up to the power of data. We’re not afraid of data. I’ve been now trained in a world where there is data, we can make informed decisions that maybe can have a more positive outcome.

But a bit about us. We were founded from the UC Berkeley Longevity Lab, the Conboy Lab. Irina Conboy is our founder. She’s widely regarded as the godmother of regenerative medicine. She’s been studying aging and age reversal strategies for many decades. She has been cited in her team almost 13,000 times, peer reviewed papers. We’re very much science first in how we approach diagnostics, how we approach helping people to make informed decisions. We’re very skeptical of people, I would say. Then Irina also, you might have heard therapeutic plasma exchange. This concept of the old blood and new blood in mice, how we can reduce aging, and hopefully preserve healthy years in mice. She discovered that 20 plus years ago, and then the same discovery happened a few years later in humans as well. She invented therapeutic plasma exchange.

Our work has been covered in some of the most highly regarded scientific publications in the world, from “Nature” to “Aging Magazine” to STEM Cell, “Rejuvenation Research.” We think a lot about the science behind regenerative medicine. There’s so much hype right now that exists in the industry. I think, as people that are practitioners living in the front lines, you’re solving problems for people. It’s really important that, I think, as an industry, we look to science first. We try to cut through the noise, so to speak. You hear a lot about maybe the supplements du jour, maybe it’s this peptide people are into, or NAD, or metformin, or whatever is the topic du jour. I think our approach is really one of making sure that the recommendations that we are advocating are grounded in science.

As Sandra was saying, we’re the fastest growing in our space, 500 clinics that we’re working with. We’re in actually 18 countries now. The product that we sell is called the SystemAge. But the real innovation, I think it’s really relevant for everyone here that’s trying to think about how they are advocating regenerative medicine programs or longevity programs, wellness practices, lifestyle choice, how they view what recommendations that we make.

We learned, and in the UC Berkeley lab, Irina and team were using…they tried to use a lot of the other…there’s many other biological clocks that are out there. The likes of TruDiagnostic and GlycanAge and Viome. There’s actually 36 clocks that are on the market right now. She started to try to use those in her research, and discovered that they were very limited and they’re very inaccurate. She started to discover that they were actually not measuring aging. This concept of using a tool, a diagnostic to understand how you age, how fast you’re aging.

If you look under the hood there, they actually use clocks, the Horvath clock, the DunedinPACE clock. Those are actually not measuring aging. Those are kind of predictive math models that use your chronological age as the basis of how they predict aging. Under the concept that we age 1/80th of our life a year, which is not how anyone ages. I lost all of my hair when I was 27 years old, very fast. Men and women age differently. In our lab, what we developed is something called biological noise. Within your epigenetics, we measure DNA methylation levels, that level of chaos, entropy, cell degeneration, the impact of your lifestyle environment stress, that 90% that we talked about that goes into impacting how we age, and if we are on course for a disease.

We actually measured our own algorithm that can address how fast you are aging at the organ and system level. We’re calling it biological noise. We want to be able to listen to our bodies. Right now, we don’t have tools that allow us to really listen, but our bodies are telling us a lot of different information. We now have a measurement tool that can look at how we’re aging. We look at 460 biomarkers across the whole body that we know are the most stable determinants of aging. It’s the most accurate in its space, but I think it’s also the most comprehensive because what we are able to detect on behalf of…for each of the users, of the 10,000 plus users that have used our test, all we require is a half milliliter of blood. Either you take it in the clinic or you can do it at home in a self-collection device.

What you’ll get on behalf of your patients or for yourself will be a look into how their organs and systems are aging. A lot of people will put an associated biological age score versus their chronological age, but I think the part that really is the most intriguing is the aging speed. How fast is this individual aging? Specifically at that organ or system level, what are the areas that are in really great shape? What are the areas that need the most amount of attention?

As we mentioned before, we’re the most accurate in our space. It’s because of how our algorithm works. The relevant piece when you’re thinking about diagnostics, the important piece is that you will be advocating different interventions and treatments and therapies on behalf of the patient depending on what he or she are they actually needing in that moment. From a practitioner standpoint, it really is incumbent on you to think about how do you measure the efficacy of what you’re advocating that you give to different individuals based off of scores that you can really trust.

We feel really confident in our ability to empower people with this understanding about the current state of health and wellness at the organ or system level, number one. But then number two, can we do something about it? This is the thing that is also quite important as well as no one wants just a bit of information and having information that they can’t act upon. One thing that we really take seriously, and we go to great lengths, is thinking about how to make these insights actionable. One interesting feature about SystemAge, if you’re using our product, you can tell us all of your own services, and therapies, and supplements, and we’ll integrate them into our recommendation engine. For instance, if you had a patient with a high blood and vascular score, we’re seeing a lot of aging that is in that particular system, you happen to recommend a red light therapy that’s really good at age reduction in that system, we’ll match it up.

We’re trying to match up your own philosophy of care with the areas of need for the patient, all in service of helping the patients to really have a set of clear actionable steps. The more complex we make it, the more esoteric to understand, the less likely someone is going to be able to keep up with the plan. They might lose interest.

One thing that I always want to point out to practitioners and people in our space, there’s a lot of recommendations and a lot of strategies for longevity and age reduction. At the smallest level, I’m sure someone here is either doing one of these things, if it’s fitness, or hormones, or NAD+, or peptides, IVs, supplements, or you’re advocating this on behalf of your patients. How do we really know if something’s working or not? I’ve had a friend that started on NAD recently. He saw an Instagram post. He was very excited about it, and then started taking NAD+. And then he said, “I’ve taken it, but I don’t…” And then a couple of weeks later, I said, “Well, how’s it going?” He’s like, “I don’t know because I don’t feel differently. I don’t have a way to really understand what’s happening under the hood.”

He’s gone and taken our test. And then has really understood that there is a lot of…to some residual benefit, to some of his lungs that he didn’t know before, which was really helpful. So, really being able to understand if something’s working or if it’s not is really a very powerful force. We are the only test, and really any test that you look at that can really feel confident about measuring treatment and the impact of treatments. So, you will be advocating lots of plans on behalf of patients. How do we feel really good about understanding a baseline of where their current health trajectory is now, giving some time of the recommendations that you’re making. And then three to six months later, we test again.

The beauty of, I think, any diagnostic in this space and especially ours is that delta between A to B. I think it’s more powerful from a user standpoint. They get that result, they understand that they can take steps to reverse aging, number one. Number two, another really important piece of longevity, yes, it’s extending healthy years, but it’s also identifying potential issues and problems before they become a problem. So, we have a number of folks that have taken our test that have a high heart score. After a few tests, they’ve gone to a cardiologist to understand a little bit more about what might be happening, and then they discover that they have very, very early cardiac issues that would have not been triggered under traditional signals.

We hear that same thing with gut health, people discovering that they have mold, early onset kind of dementia and potential problems. So, we know that aging can be a biomarker for maybe a shortened shelf life, but also for a potential event down the road. So, when we think about longevity strategies and treatments, we want to identify the areas that are in the most need for health span expansion, but we also want to identify them for areas that could be problems down the road.

This is a case study about a clinic that was able to use a stem cell product to measure the before and the after of this stem cell intervention. They were able to detect that for this patient, they had decreased over three different tests of time, all just within a few months of each other, so actually within one month of each other. We’re seeing a decrease in biological age at these multiple systems across the board, 13.6 years reversed, 7.5. So, we’re actually seeing that you’re able to quantify age reduction. We think about strategies such as therapeutic plasma exchange, the adding of healthy years. We feel really good about having a really accurate measurement of where is this individual on this timeline and what can we do to reverse aging.

Just to point out, as our little glamour shot. We only point out this slide about the kind of users that are using our product because relevant to our earlier part of this discussion, we are seeing more of an appetite and awareness for preventative care, for internal health, for what is longevity from folks in the entertainment industry. We work with a lot of business people that we…kind of titans of industry, different entertainers, all the way down to different people that are using our test for heart health, pain management, weight loss, chronic issues that they’re facing, fertility.

We will soon be adding three new functions, which are really exciting. These individuals will be benefiting from them. One is new insights into women’s reproductive health. One is mitochondria, which I know is very popular these days of helping to understand how we can understand better about our mitochondria aging. And skin is our last one that will be available next month. The tie that binds here is that making it measurable, making it manageable, and making it reversible. We can all relate to this as individuals and also practitioners that are helping solve intervention problems with people. We have an X amount of time in a bank, so to speak. How can we preserve those healthy years?

We are living in a world where we have the ability to, with proper changes and updated strategies, to add 20 plus years more of one’s health span or beyond. So, we always ask ourselves, what would you do? What would you pay? How would you spend the time bank of 20 more years of healthy life? That is it. generationlab.com is our website. That’s my email for anyone that wants to reach out to me and ask questions. With that, I’ll stop talking, Sandra, on and on. But I wanted to paint a picture of how we view longevity, how we empower people that are meeting with clients to make better decisions on behalf of the patients.

Dr. Sandi: Well, thank you for that fabulous presentation. And that last question. So, coaching is all about asking questions, getting people to see what really matters to them. And so, that’s a great coaching question to ask people. What is it worth? What would you pay for that health span as opposed to having time at the end that is a sick time? And you are doing such exciting work. And I know we had had a conversation, because the clinics and the doctors who are using your tests, that this is perfect for coaches to support those individuals. So, I want to make sure we get to some questions. How is the gut evaluated with just blood?

Alex: Good question. So, across the board, what we’re looking at is we’re measuring that DNA methylation level at that epigenetic layer, including the gut. We mentioned 460 biomarkers, which is the biomarkers across the whole body. But then within that 460, we know which biomarkers that we are putting our algorithm toward that are associated with the gut. So, the same premise of brain and health. And when we do that, we can understand the entropy, that cell degeneration, that cell decay. We’ll be able to do that for all of the organs and systems. And that’s how we’re able to add new systems and functions, the ones that we talked about before.

And then on gut health, I will point out that we had a, we mentioned, I had a biohacker with whom we’re working, just a lovely individual. And she took our test, and of the 19 functions, 18 of them were in great shape, very slow pace of aging, except one was her gut. She went to a gut specialist. And the specialist discovered that she had an ordinary amount of mold that existed in her gut. And she had no idea. She went to her place of work. She started to understand that there was mold in an old building that she worked at. And she has no symptoms. She was just in great shape.

Dr. Sandi: Value of testing. How can your testing be utilized in rare disorders?

Alex: Great question. If you think about the premise here, where if you had a person that had a high score in a particular organ or system that is associated with a rare disorder. So, what we look at is that level of chaos, that entropy, that cell degeneration that could be a bellwether for something more serious. So, we have a very consistent thesis where we’re not going to tell you that you have Alzheimer’s disease. However, we do know, and it’s well documented, that when you have increased pace of aging within your neurodegeneration, it increases the likelihood that something can be amiss there. So, this is like a check engine light for your car, so to speak, to know what areas within this individual need to be addressed, and then what might be lurking for them in the future.

Dr. Sandi: Makes sense. How do you verify the accuracy of the testing results?

Alex: Great question. So, I have many papers on this. And Scott and Sandra can help us to distribute those if you like. There’s many documented third parties that look at the predictive nature of these biological clocks that we talked about. Now, the slide that I presented before, it was a double-blind study that looked at very extensive third party, that looked at individuals that they knew had a heart condition, or a brain condition, or a liver disease. We were able to identify that 99.9% of the time versus the other folks are probably 54%. And I do hear that a lot. A very consistent theme is that people report that the results that we get with this kind of a model of biological noise is very much in line with their expectation. They know that they’ve had COVID, maybe long COVID, they’re battling with that. We often see a lung score and some residual scores as well. We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that this is all verified.

Dr. Sandi: Okay. Is it available in Europe? And I think we can talk about how much is… Do you offer a discount to practitioners?

Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So, the short answer to a couple of these. It is available in Europe. And specifically, a number of… Actually almost pretty much across Europe. So, we work with some distributors in Europe, 18 countries, parts of Southeast Asia, and the global demand is maybe even more striking than the U.S. From a price standpoint, we absolutely offer discounts. Our MSRP, if you go on our website, is $499. If our practitioner level…depending on the volume that we’re working with, we’re getting significantly less than that per unit, closer to the $399 route. But I will say that from a pricing standpoint, what we hear a lot is that the benefits are striking. You’re going to see a more engaged patient. You’re going to see there are more frequent visits, less churn. You’re going to get that person that’s going to have very actionable results. And then you’re going to be able to see a 4X boost in services and therapy sales all through the ability to match up what you offer and your own mindset with the need area.

Dr. Sandi: Okay. Yeah. Any partnerships, potential partnerships with health coaches and education? We are already partners. We love to work with you and have you back.

Alex: Actually, let me point out something that is really great. If you have interest in working with us on this partnership side, we have a lot of individuals that have come in from our website that are looking for a practitioner, so client referrals. We would love it if anyone is of interest to help us be a referral, part of our referral network. We’d love to do that.

Dr. Sandi: And this is great because many of these people would really benefit from working with a health coach. So, they may not be a practitioner to order and interpret those tests, but the value, which is even greater, is that they’re going to help them to see what they can do to take charge of their health. How they can move the needle by these lifestyle changes, and that’s so critical.

Alex: And they’ve already taken the first step because they’ve taken the test themselves, and they’re ready to get serious about this.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. So, that is being able to offer services to your practitioners, your clinics, your consumers.

Alex: There’s one question about different and TruDiagnostics, just to put a very fine point on this one. So, TruDiagnostics does not measure aging. Those are biological clocks. And they are using your chronological age to kind of a predictive model, but tangibly what that means is that they’re not giving you an accurate measurement of aging. And that’s why we exist, because of frustration of using the likes of those kinds of tools. So, we went and made our own.

Dr. Sandi: Got you. All right. Well, this has been a delight to be with you. And I know that this was informative for everybody. So, thank you. Thank you so much.

Alex: Wonderful. I really appreciate all the thoughtful questions. Someone asked about how long does it take for a report to come back? It takes three weeks.

Dr. Sandi: Oh, apologies if I missed that question.

Alex: It will be available in the portal, and you’ll be able to see the results first.

Dr. Sandi: Sounds great. Well, thank you so much for being with us.

Alex: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you for all the work that you’re doing in this organization, Sandra, and Scott, and Natalie.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you.