Longevity medicine, inside a real hospital
Dr Evelyne Bischof is a practising physician in Shanghai working in two fields at once — oncology and longevity medicine — and her argument is that the separation between them is artificial and expensive.
She is a clinician first, and says so: you react to the need when there is illness, that is what she was trained for, and it is her passion rather than merely her job. But there also has to be a frontier. Her framing is that longevity is fuelled by sick care, and that sick care in turn has a great deal to gain from longevity diagnostics and interventions.
The clearest example is already in use. Biological ageing clocks help triage oncological patients into different therapies. Where there is a fine line between which regimen to use, the biological-age assessment helps decide. And it matters most for a group medicine routinely fails: patients above the age cut-off for randomised clinical trials, for whom nobody actually knows whether a therapy will help. A number that describes their biology rather than their birthday is, in that situation, genuinely actionable.
She collaborates on senolytics with Professor James Kirkland, in triple-negative breast cancer and glioblastoma — two entities she believes stand to benefit.
On AI she quotes Peter Diamandis, whom we also met on this quest: there will come a point when not using AI to guide you in medicine is a breach of the Hippocratic oath, because you are doing harm. She thinks longevity medicine has more powerful tools available now than oncology did then — the whole of omics, and a growing understanding of epigenetics — and is frank that what the field needs is money put in the right places, and enough different stakeholders willing to talk to each other.
