Methuselah Foundation

Methuselah Foundation, an organization with the motto of “Making 90 the new 50 by 2030”, was started by Dr. Aubrey de Grey in 2001. It incubates and sponsors mission-relevant ventures, funds research, and supports projects and prizes to accelerate breakthroughs in longevity. This organization has six different primary approaches towards the problems of aging.

Methuselah is working with Organovo, NASA, New Organ Alliance, Organ Preservation Alliance, and Volumetric to create replacement parts for the human body. It seeks to regenerate organs, cartilage, bone tissue, and vasculature, the system of blood vessels that perfuses human organs. Regenerating vasculature has historically been a tremendous problem in tissue engineering.

Methuselah wishes to remove naturally forming toxic compounds, such as amyloids, from cells and organs, and it wishes to remove ineffective and harmful cells from the human body. The company has enlisted Antoxerene, OncoSenX, Leucadia Therapeutics, and Oisin Biotechnologies to assist in this endeavor.

In addition to vasculature, Methuselah intends to focus on the circulatory system as a whole. As our arteries stiffen and we lose waste clearance, oxygen exchange, and the ability to form new blood vessels, our cells become starved for oxygen. Methuselah wishes to restore the bloodstream back to youthful function, including angiogenesis and the transfer of vital particles through the bloodstream, and its partners in this space include NASA, Volumetric, Leucadia Therapeutics, and Organovo.

In order to determine what interventions are effective, Methuselah is aiming to create a biometric suite that will analyze what is happening to people’s cells. The company notes that if people are unaware of what exactly is happening to them, they won’t be able to solve their problems. ReverCell, MyOmics Labs, and the Society for Gerontological Engineering and Technology are its partner companies here.

Methuselah is engaging ReverCell in its quest to solve the hallmark of stem cell exhaustion. As we age, we lose the banks of cells that we use to replace natural losses, and our immune systems begin to fail as well. Methuselah advocates replenishing our stem cells in order to reverse this aspect of aging.

Finally, Methuselah is focusing on a different problem, one not often addressed by companies in the longevity space: it intends to encourage elderly people to want longevity to begin with. Age is often accompanied by a loss of independence, depression, hopelessness, and loneliness, especially when elderly people are unable to do the things they did in youth. Methuselah intends to enlist Leucadia Therapeutics to restore the minds, abilities, and senses of older people, thus restoring their freedom and encouraging them to want longer, healthier lives.

Methuselah has a long and storied history going back two decades. One of its first achievements was the creation of the M PRIZE in 2003, a prize that was ultimately given to two different research groups for breaking the world record for longevity in mice and for using rapamycin to extend the lifespans of already aged mice.

In 2019, Methuselah Foundation founded Viscient, a company dedicated to using human cells and organoids to conduct trials rather than mouse models.