In March of this year, I had the opportunity to attend the Milan Longevity Summit, a collection of open to the public conferences about healthy aging and longevity. Among the projectors, some names immediately popped up, such as David Sinclair and Nir Barzilai, both world-renowned in their fields of research as well as respected public figures advocating for longevity science. The conference I attended took place at MEET Digital Culture Center, a beautiful venue at the heart of Milan (about 10 minutes from the famous Duomo) that focuses on areas of digital innovation and technology. After arrival and a brief registration, we all gathered in their state-of-the-art theater. Several high-definition speakers worked in an ensemble to create a very immersive viewing experience that surrounded us in a 180-degree fashion.
The director, Maria Grazia Mattei, made an introduction, expressing her great excitement to host the Milan Longevity Summit in the MEET center and the unique opportunity to make the city a central hub for longevity. The goal of the two week long conference was to bridge the gap between longevity and technological innovation.
The first speaker was Jamie Metzl, an author, a political commentator, and a past US government official. Despite not being a trained scientist, I was struck by his vast knowledge and attention to minute terms in the areas of science and medicine. Metzl opened with a personal story about his father being diagnosed with cancer and receiving a very unoptimistic prognosis. Research led him to look for alternative treatments to classical chemotherapy (to which doctors gave only 30% chance of helping). After performing gene sequencing for the tumor, and choosing a suitable target therapy, his father outlived his prognosis substantially (and still does to date). This story paved the way for a discussion about the utilization of technology for the development of targeted medicine, understanding that even people with the same disease can be vastly different in many aspects.
Metzl continued with the fascinating story of the development of early artificial intelligence to this day, starting with Google’s Deep Blue chess computer beating Gary Kasparov in 1997. The recent developments in AI and neural networks allow for great advancements in all areas of science and research today. In Metzl's eyes, the future of medicine is an ethical collaboration between man and machine, not one substituting the other. A doctor that can utilize AI to achieve better outcomes for his patients (using personalized medicine), and an AI that will need a doctor to guide it. Metzl ended his talk with an open question – as humans are now able to create intelligence (and maybe even superintelligence), once attributed to the divine – can we also use it ethically and wisely?
In the second day of talks, the speakers covered various topics around compelling scientific arguments and important social issues. Dr. Federico Esposti talked about the irrelevance of today’s hospitals in the setting of healthy aging and longevity medicine. Since healthy aging seems to have become our own responsibility, Dr. Esposti together with the San Rafaelle hospital in Milan have started an initiative for preventive and personalized medicine. Prof. Federica Agosta, a neuroimaging expert, spoke about the impact of dementia on people’s lives, and how we can utilize AI to study brain imaging to detect signs of the disease decades before clinical signs appear.
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On the use of wearable technology in support of active aging, spoke Giuseppe Anderoni from the Milan Politecnico (of bioengineering). He pointed out the huge rise in popularity of wearables in this decade, with smart watches, glasses, and other accessories that allow us to collect data and monitor ourselves. These accessories, powered by AI (digital therapeutics or DTx), are currently being tested as a part of a coaching platform to constantly monitor and plan real-time interventions to promote a healthy lifestyle and active aging.
Dr. Andrea Maier spoke about key issues with longevity medicine. She emphasized our desperate need for high-quality research and referred to current longevity medicine as a “wild west” that must adopt evidence-based practices to progress into the future. She continued to explain that developing a reliable way to measure our biological age is crucial to manage and treat aging (maybe with the help of wearable technologies). She ended with mentioning several researched compounds including Rapamycin (that in her eyes is not ready for humans yet), NAD+ supplements (to possibly improve physical activity) and teased exciting research that is about to be published about Urolithin A very soon.
Many other speakers covered fascinating topics such as music and the brain, the importance of sleep and circadian rhythm, psychiatry and depression, and inflammation (or inflamm-aging). Moreover, Dr. Tzipi Strauss from Israel has introduced a new, one-of-a-kind center that has recently opened in Sheba hospital, dedicated exclusively to treating, researching, and innovating in the field of longevity.
To conclude, on top of being highly educational with brilliant speakers from all around the world, this summit was an eye-opener, both to the scale of global longevity research and to people’s great passion to live longer and improve our health and well-being. I believe that this Milan summit and hopefully many more to come, will put Milan on the map as a global center of innovation for aging and longevity.
If you are interested in learning more about the foundations of longevity science, you are invited to enroll to our new course "The Basics of Longevity Science". Link