Seasoned longevity investor Dmitry Kaminksiy, who is a General Partner at of Deep Knowledge Group, has released a new book containing several provocative-but-data-driven longevity focused warnings, predictions and calls-to-action.
Kaminskiy and his company were an early investor in this longevity sector, including providing the seed financing in 2014 for an ana artificial intelligence biomarkers and drug development company. The company has gone on to raise $255 million in Series C financing. , Kaminskiy also inaugurated a $1 million prize in 2015 for the first person to celebrate their 123rd birthday.
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The venture capitalist also serves as managing trustee for the charity that, in 2018, created a World Health Organization approved disease code for ‘ageing’ (XT9T) for the first time in history. This discover may allow for drugs targeting that disease to be clinically evaluated and approved, and for insurance companies to provide coverage for therapies targeting that disease.
Kaminskiy has additionally provided the initial financial and organizational support for the formation of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group for Longevity (which is the world’s first Longevity-focused parliamentary group).
The new book is titled ‘Biomarkers of Human Longevity: Data Science for Accelerating Aging Research and R&D and The Critical Catalyst for Practical Human Longevity, Tangible Investment Decision Making and De-Risking’. The central point describes what Kaminskiy feels to be an industry-wide unacknowledged risk and flaw: overreliance on results in model organisms (such as mice).
The concern with basing longevity studies on mice is the extent to which the rodents can truly mimic human physiology. This over-reliance, says Kaminskiy in the book, is to cause market failures.
If these market issues are left unaddressed they will pose serious risks for declining investor sentiment in the sector. Another likelihood is a longevity boom-and-bust cycle with the net effect of failing to deliver real-world humanitarian impacts for citizens and national economies.
Another section of the book proposes a market-ready solution. This rests on biomarkers of human longevity. Kaminskiy proposes that this becomes the major tool for investment. This is due to diligence and company valuation, reliable forecasting of clinical trial results, smoother Longevity IPOs and less-volatile Longevity public markets (stocks).
One fascinating section is the chapter on the convergences between longevity and space medicine. This rests bin part on a 2017 scientific paper that Kaminskiy wrote with Franco Cortese (of the Aging Analytics Agency and others from NASA, Health Canada, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, Belgian Nuclear Research Centre, and Oxford University. The paper is titled “Vive la radiorésistance!: converging research in radiobiology and biogerontology to enhance human radioresistance for deep space exploration and colonization”.
