Avi Roy is a cell biologist and biogerontologist based in London and Oxford. His path into the field is a familiar name on this site: eighteen years ago Aubrey de Grey set him on it, he moved from the US to Oxford, did his PhD, and has spent the whole time since in labs, in startups, and in the community — including years as Chief Scientific Officer of Liz Parrish’s gene-therapy company, BioViva.
His bench science was about rescuing cells from old age. Take human skin cells, plate them, and they head for one endpoint: senescence — they stop dividing and just sit there. To “rejuvenate” a cell is to stop it reaching that point. One result he replicated and loves: transplant mitochondria from young cells into old ones and you can rejuvenate them almost completely.
But the thread that runs through his whole page is a warning against magic bullets. Open a newspaper and antioxidants are good; open another and they are bad. That is not because scientists are stupid — it is because the real problem in biology is specificity: the right thing, in the right dose, at the right time, to the right cells, in the right tissue.
This is why he talks in modalities — not what the drug is but how it reaches its target. A pill has to survive the gut, the liver, the bloodstream and still bind the right receptor: “a lot of hoping and praying.” Gene and cell therapies can be far more specific, and he is openly biased toward them — but they are one modality among many: peptides, antibodies, RNA, glue proteins. No single tool solves ageing, exactly the lesson Liz Parrish learned the hard way.
He is also, quietly, one of the field’s great builders: President of the Biogerontology Research Foundation, organiser of hundreds of talks and conferences, and founder of the Longevity Reporter. His advice to an eighteen-year-old is characteristically his: go to Our World in Data, understand how humanity actually got here — then start building.
SenescenceMitochondriaModalitiesBiogerontology
London · July 2024
Above the Thames, July 2024
Where we met
We first met Avi in Shanghai, with Liz Parrish; this second conversation was in a London apartment high over the Thames, the old city and the new through the glass, sirens cutting in every few minutes. It is one of the most clarifying hours on the whole quest about how longevity medicine will actually be delivered — and it ends on the least technical advice imaginable.
Shanghai
First meeting
With Liz Parrish — the start of the friendship.
Oxford
PhD & after
Cell biology, senescence, and the hunt for real biomarkers of ageing.
London
July 2024
The interview, high above the Thames.
“The problem with biology is that you have to do the right thing, in the right dose, at the right time, to the right types of cells, in the right type of tissue.”
— Avi Roy, London
On the quest
Shanghai to London
Above the Thames. High over London — the old city and the new through the glass, sirens included.The London apartment. With Marek and Antonia Schultze-Mosgau — two London interviews in one afternoon.Where it started. Shanghai, 2023 — where Marek and Avi first met, with Liz Parrish.A London garden, 2024. With Nikolina Lauc, Antonia Schultze-Mosgau, Tim and Marek — the London circle off duty.
In his words
Learn how we got here, then build
“Take mitochondria from young cells and put them into older cells, and you can rejuvenate them almost completely.”
Avi Roy · London, July 2024
On a plate, cells have one endpoint. To rejuvenate them is to stop them reaching it.
Avi Roy
Somewhere a newspaper says antioxidants are good; somewhere it says they’re bad. That’s specificity, not stupidity.
Avi Roy
A small molecule has to survive the gut, the liver, the bloodstream — a lot of hoping and praying.
Avi Roy
If I could go back to eighteen, I’d say: start building. That’s the best way to do stuff.
Avi Roy
In his own words
Straight from the interview
From the London conversation — how you rescue a cell, why delivery is the real problem, and the advice he would give his eighteen-year-old self.
Rescuing a cell
His bench work: human skin cells on a plate march toward senescence — they stop dividing and simply sit. Rejuvenation means preventing that. The finding he keeps returning to is that swapping in young mitochondria can almost completely reverse it — a hint that the powerhouse of the cell is closer to the centre of ageing than we assume.
“Bring in new mitochondria from young cells, and you rescue the old ones.”
London · from the interview
The shingles vaccine
The finding he is most animated about, and the one he thinks most people over fifty are missing. Natural experiments in socialised health systems — a birth-date cut-off, two near-identical groups, years of follow-up — then clinical data: lower inflammation, slower epigenetic and biological ageing, and a reduction in dementia risk he puts at 20 to 25 per cent. He is careful about where the evidence ends and the extrapolation begins.
“There’s nothing in the works that has that much impact.”
Online · April 2026
Why modalities matter
The word he wants the audience to keep. A drug is only as good as its delivery: a pill must clear the gut, the liver and the bloodstream and still bind the right receptor. Gene and cell therapies are more precise, but they are one of many modalities — peptides, antibodies, RNA, glue proteins — and ageing will need all of them.
“It’s a method. A delivery system. That’s the whole game.”
London · from the interview
Learn, then build
Asked what to tell a young person, he doesn’t prescribe a cause. He prescribes context: go to Our World in Data, see how median lifespan climbed from the mid-thirties to nearly eighty, understand how we got here — and only then choose what to build. Ageing, climate, inequality: we’re all running in parallel.
“Once you know how we got here, you can build the future you want.”
Avi is President of the Biogerontology Research Foundation and founder of the Longevity Reporter. Find him on X at @agingroy.
From the conversation
Avi Roy, in his words
Video interview
The video interview is coming. Recorded interviews go live after the launch of the film & series Live Beyond.
From the conversation in London, July 2024, in an apartment above the Thames — with the occasional siren. Lightly edited for readability. We first met Avi in Shanghai, with Liz Parrish. Below the London passages, a second conversation from April 2026 on the shingles vaccine.
On what he studied
Avi Roy“I’m a cell biologist. I looked at what goes wrong in cells as they get older — mine were human skin cells, keratinocytes and fibroblasts. When you take cells out and plate them, they really have one endpoint: they senesce. After a while they stop dividing and just lie on the plate, not doing anything. So when you’re trying to “rejuvenate” cells on a plate, that’s the endpoint you’re stopping them from reaching. What I learned — and this wasn’t my work, I replicated it — is that taking mitochondria from young cells and putting them into older cells can rejuvenate them almost completely. That’s very big.”
On modalities
Avi Roy“Aubrey de Grey and others say gene and cell therapies — and I did a gene-and-cell company with Liz Parrish, BioViva. But what the audience needs to understand is that it’s a modality. A method. A delivery system. In the last fifteen years we’ve gone from small molecules and peptides to monoclonal antibodies, RNA therapies, gene therapies, biphasic antibodies — all these modalities coming out. And the one thing to take away: open a newspaper and somewhere it says antioxidants are good, and somewhere it says they’re bad. That doesn’t mean scientists are stupid. The problem with biology is you have to do the right thing, in the right dose, at the right time, to the right types of cells, in the right type of tissue.”
On why gene therapy is not a magic bullet
Avi Roy“A small molecule you take orally goes through your gastrointestinal system, has to break down in the gut, enter the bloodstream, go to the liver, get metabolised, travel to the right tissue and bind the right receptor. That’s a lot of hoping and praying. Gene and cell therapies can be far more specific — I’m biased toward them, just like Aubrey — but they’re one of many modalities. We’ll need peptides, antibodies, glue proteins, all of it. No single thing solves ageing.”
A second conversation — online, April 2026. Marek called Avi back with one question: why does a shingles vaccine keep turning up in longevity conversations? What follows is the essence of that call, lightly edited. It is a conversation between two people, not medical advice — take it to your own doctor.
How it was found — the natural experiment
Avi Roy“In a world where shingles vaccines exist, the discovery process is about figuring out whether there is a difference between the treated group and the untreated group. The way you do that originally is by looking at socialised healthcare systems — Denmark, the UK — and seeing where the cut-off is. When the vaccine got approved, people above a certain birth date got it, and the people just the year before didn’t. Then you follow them over time, and when enough people have died you can see what the impact of that one change was, controlling for other drugs they may be taking, other diseases they may have had. That is called a natural experiment. And then, of course, you do actual trials.”
What the data actually shows
Avi Roy“Lower inflammation, slower epigenetic ageing, transcriptomic ageing, biological ageing — plus the dementia risk reduction. And it is already based on the clinical trials as well. We have a good chunk of data now.”
Marek Piotrowski“I read estimates that it might lower the risk of dementia by 20 to 25 per cent. Do you know better numbers?”
Avi Roy“Some natural experiments have pulled it up to 40, but there is a lot of confounding in those results. Separating the natural experiments from what the clinical trial data shows, I think it would be closer to 20 to 25 per cent — which is huge, because there is nothing in the works that has that much impact.”
Who should have it — and where the evidence stops
Avi Roy“If you are 50-plus, you should get your shingles shot. The protocol is still being refined. In the UK the dosing is 65 and above; in America it is 50 and above, and everybody who is eligible we are recommending to get it. In our clinical practice we do it prophylactically earlier in clients who are at higher risk because of their APOE and their family risk profile — and there we are looking at it from dementia risk reduction rather than anything else. Shingrix is a two-shot protocol. If you are going to take it, take both doses. We don’t have any data on a single dose.”
Avi Roy“And I have to tell you: as evidence-based as I am, that last part is vibe-based. If you brought on an immunologist, or a neurologist, or the people actually studying this, they would tell you we don’t have evidence for that particular protocol. So let me tell you where the ground rules are — something really interesting is happening with the shingles vaccine, and in the United States, where the threshold is 50, no clinician sees any harm in giving that dose to a fifty-year-old.”
Why he trusts the chain of logic
Avi Roy“Functional medicine kind of works in reverse: it looks for the mechanism and then sells that stuff. This is working the right way round. We have epidemiological data that something is happening. Then we go down and pick the thing that could have modified it — in this case the shingles vaccine. If it is having this effect, how could it possibly be having it? Through immune modulation. And if that is the case, other things that do the same should show it too. It is falsifiable evidence, and so far the chain of logic is working: the flu vaccine data is going in the same direction, and the data from the vaccines so far is all going the same way. That gives us good strength.”
And why he will not call any of it a longevity result
Avi Roy“If you can’t measure a problem, then it isn’t science — it is just vibes. Longevity vibes exist, but you can’t really measure longevity. What you can measure is whether they died of cancer, of these diseases. Besides functional measurements — VO₂ max, muscle mass — there is no true way of measuring longevity, and those biomarkers are not validated. In eighteen years as a longevity scientist I wish it did exist. Proteomic clocks, maybe metabolomics, could be clinically useful — they are coming down the pipeline. I have hope that within five years we will have really good longevity markers. Currently there aren’t any.”
On biomarkers — the real bottleneck
Avi Roy“My PhD got stuck in biomarkers of cellular ageing. Even measuring senescence — something measured since Leonard Hayflick in the 1970s — doesn’t quite work out. If I do something to a cell, I want to know within five days whether it worked, not wait a year. And that’s the same problem with human beings: what needles do we move, what can we measure in a clinic, that will tell me a person who is forty today will still be alive and healthy at fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty? That has been the journey since my PhD.”
His message to Aleksander’s generation
Avi Roy“When you wake up in the morning, go to Our World in Data — it’s an Oxford non-profit project. It shows you the shape of the world and how we got here: population, ageing, cancer rates, income. Until about 1850, median lifespan was in the mid-thirties; now it’s getting close to eighty. How did we get there? Smoking cessation, vaccinations. Context matters. Once you have a real picture of how the world is today and how we got here, you can build the future you want — ageing, climate, inequality, whatever it is. We’re all in this together, running in parallel.”
Marek Piotrowski“So learn, get inspired, choose your purpose, and start building.”
Avi Roy“Absolutely. If I could go back to eighteen, I would a hundred per cent say: start building. That’s the best way to do stuff.”
More passages from the full interview will be published here.
Continue the quest
More minds on the quest
Avi Roy sits in Radical Life Extension (senescence, mitochondria, gene and cell therapy) with a strong second life in Creating the Movement — the foundation, the conferences, the Longevity Reporter. Read him next to Liz Parrish and Aubrey de Grey.
