September 22, 2022 | Issue #19

Good Evening

. Welcome back to another issue of Spannr. 

In this week's newsletter

:

📷 The dataset we've been waiting for

👍 Economic benefits

🔔 Another company goes public

📢 More business news & weekend reading

Another Landmark Study On The Way...

Yesterday, UK Biobank, a biomedical database, announced an ambitious project to conduct a repeated set of imaging scans on a massive cohort of participants.The end result will be the largest longitudinal imaging dataset to date – a goldmine for researchers across all fields aiming to further assess disease progression.The project is in partnership with a few big players in the space, including:

• The Medical Research Council (MRC)

• Calico Life Sciences, an Alphabet subsidiary whose mission is to increase our understanding of the biology that controls human aging

• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan

This £30 million project will capture a repeated set of highly detailed, multi-organ images from 60,000 UK Biobank participants, enabling researchers to better understand the trajectory of major chronic diseases of mid-to-later life and allow them to further explore the mechanisms through which diseases occur in individuals.Here's all that will be collected:

• MRI scans of the brain and heart

• X-rays to measure bone density

• MRI measures of fat distribution

• Ultrasounds of carotid arteries, the major blood vessels that provide your brain's blood supply

The BackdropThe project falls on the heels of UK Biobank's imaging study that began in 2014, which captured a base layer of the same data listed above. With over 50,000 participants (and plans to collect initial data on up to 100,000 participants over the next couple of years), UK Biobank already boasts the largest dataset of its kind.The second phase of the project will involve performing repeat imaging on roughly 60,000 of these participants, two to seven years after their initial scan.The Bigger PictureLongitudinal studies that use MRI scans performed over multiple points in time have been increasingly employed throughout all fields of biology and, if done right, are highly effective. While costly and painfully time-consuming, researchers get the chance to study biological changes in individuals – a critically important feature for scientists focused on the onset of age-related disease.Now, just imagine if we had the ability to collect the same data but with select interventions applied – think rapamycin, metformin, or any other potential anti-aging therapeutic or treatment – what discoveries would that lead to?Although the regulatory process isn't there yet, that doesn't negate the desperate need for more longitudinal studies. For example, thanks to longitudinal imaging, a group of researchers at Oxford University were able to see data from hundreds of UK Biobank participants before and after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. This made it possible to identify short-term changes in specific parts of the brain, further confirming COVID's potential impact on one's smell and taste.While the latest UK Biobank project won't be administering interventions, the study should give future scientists a dataset for important health-related research and perhaps new foundational evidence. Such insights could lead to improvements in pre-symptomatic disease diagnosis and may even support the development of new treatments for age-related disease.

Gains to Achieving Healthy Longevity

A paper coming from the bright minds of Andrew Scott, Julian Ashwin, Martin Ellison and David Sinclair just dropped that explores the economic returns (in dollar terms) of improving the relationship between biological and chronological age.Unfortunately, this is a paywalled paper, but perhaps this quote from the abstract will pique your interest:

But if that's not enough, there was another paper (no paywall here) published in Nature Aging last year on the same topic. The authors calculated that just one year of average lifespan extension will bring the U.S. economy a benefit of $38 trillion dollars annually. While it does sound too good to be true – yes, we'll give you that – $38 trillion is more than enough to cover our entire national debt.We're not too keen on political speak here, but sheesh – a ~5% boost to our GDP... or, similarly, an annual benefit of $38 trillion? Even if the numbers are inflated or skewed, life extension sounds a lot more productive than most initiatives we hear on the national docket.Taking this a step further, though, one would have to wonder what the recent life expectancy drop in America – from 79 in 2019 to 76 in 2021 – has done to our GDP and economy.In all seriousness, while some longevity debates inevitably slip into discussions of sci-fi, its numbers like these that will have the power to influence those in the halls of government to set better standards and budgets for the burgeoning geroscience community.And it seems to be working. Newt Gingrich, the previous Speaker of the House, in February published a post recommending that the U.S. government begin to take aging research seriously as a way to help balance the budget.

• Salk Institute, with a historic five-year, $126 million grant from the NIH, establishes new Center for Multiomic Human Brain Cell Atlas to better understand how human brains work and age

• BeakerDAO and SpaceshipDAO express interest in VitaDAO, as part of its Institutional Genesis Raise, with contributions of $75,000 and $50,000

• California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) awards UCI $2.7 million to create a regenerative medicine training program

• FOXO Technologies, a company looking to modernize the life insurance industry while also providing longevity insights to customers, successfully began trading this week on the NYSE under the symbol FOXO.

• Unity Biotechnology Completes Enrollment in Phase 2 Envision Study of UBX1325 In Wet Age-Related Macular Degeneration

• Scholar Rock Appoints Jay Backstrom, M.D., M.P.H., to be its Next Chief Executive Officer

• CohBar Announces Reverse Stock Split

• Celularity Enters Into $150 Million Pre-Paid Advance Agreement with Yorkville

• MyMD Pharmaceuticals Provides Dosing Update on Phase 2 Multi-Center Clinical Trial of MYMD-1® as a Therapy for Delaying Aging and Extending Healthy Lifespan

• Insilico Medicine and Saudi Ministry of Investment sign agreement to expand region’s biotechnology capabilities

• 2 Minutes To Midlife: The Fantastic Unspecified Future of Epigenetic Clocks (NEO.LIFE)

• Scientists Have Long Dreamed of a Memory Prosthesis. The First Human Trials Look Promising (Singularity Hub)

• Five lupus patients enter long-lasting remission after immunotherapy (New Atlas)

• Can You Die of Old Age? More Doctors Are Saying Yes (WSJ)

• The Basics of DNA and Genetic Systems (Visual Capitalist)

• In the Matter of Human Longevity There Will Be Opportunists and Alchemists (Fight Aging)

• Researchers are working on one age-related problem we often take for granted: Baldness (Methuselah Foundation)

Performance:

Latest Price: $118.357d-Return: -14.73%Market Cap: $10.09b

Big Movers:

Scholar Rock (SRRK): -20.04%MyMD (MYMD): -27.87%Athersys (ATHX): -46.82%