Who they are
A university that decided to run the trials
At the National University of Singapore a group of laboratories and a clinical centre work on the same question from four directions at once: what actually happens as a body ages, what can be given to slow it, whether it works in people, and how a doctor would ever prescribe it.
Singapore is unusual in that the question is not theoretical there. Brian Kennedy told us, in October 2023, that the studies had already begun.
Test
Intervention trials
Time-release alpha-ketoglutarate, rapamycin, and more in the pipeline — in people, in Singapore, now.
Measure
Ageing clocks at scale
Following thousands of Singaporeans to find out what ageing actually looks like in one population.
Practise
Longevity medicine in the clinic
Andrea Maier’s work: getting all of this into the hands of doctors who see patients.
In their own words
What they told us
We’ve already started looking at interventions. So we’ve started a clinical study on time-release alpha-ketoglutarate. We’re planning one on rapamycin, and several others in the pipeline.
We should also switch a little bit the gears and not only look at the United States. Maybe other countries or even regions like Asia or Europe are now taking the lead into it.
Brian Kennedy in Singapore, October 2023; Andrea Maier at NUS, February 2024. Fillers removed; nothing else changed. We also filmed Vincenzo Sorrentino and Jan Gruber walking through Singapore, but no line has been cut clean from that recording yet, so there is nothing here in quotation marks from either of them.
Behind it
The people we met
Several of the scientists we filmed for Live Beyond work at NUS. Each has a page of their own.
Distinguished Professor at NUS — thousands of Singaporeans, biological ageing clocks, and the first intervention trials. Wrote the book’s foreword.
See their profile ↗︎
Professor at NUS — on getting longevity medicine into clinical practice, and why thirty years without a definition of frailty kept it out.
See their profile ↗︎
Mitochondria and the stress response — what goes wrong inside the cell’s power stations, and what can be done about it.
See their profile ↗︎
Drug combinations rather than single compounds — because ageing is not one problem.
See their profile ↗︎
And we were there
The conference, and the intensive course
NUS is also where a large part of this field meets. We filmed at the Healthy Longevity conference in Singapore in February 2024 — Nir Barzilai and Andrea Maier together, Guido Kroemer on the hallmarks, Stephanie Dainow, and a room full of people who had flown a long way to argue about biomarkers.
Alek was eighteen and worked the whole week — running a camera, asking his own questions, and getting answers that were often better than mine.
Alek talking with Andrea Maier about the NUS Healthy Longevity conference — on Marek’s LinkedIn →
From the Intensive Course on Healthy Longevity
Marek in conversation with Hans Meij at the NUS Intensive Course — on what the course is for, and on what a person actually does with it afterwards.