The London Longevity Newsletter — Issue 10

Welcome to Issue 10 of the London Longevity Newsletter 🗞️

🚨 Announcing a new London Longevity Network event, hosted in collaboration with ARIA and Venture Cafe London ⚡

Accelerating Healthy Longevity: From Code to Cities on Thursday, 25th September

We’ll have talks and expert panels, startup demos, practical workshops, and even a techno set 🎶🧬🎤🤖 Sign up here to learn the full spectrum of longevity and how it’s shaping the future of wellness, population health and our cities.

Now let’s dive in! 🧪

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT 🧬

• Can Network Medicine accelerate drug repurposing and discovery for longevity?
  A new study takes on the complexity of aging with a network medicine framework, mapping 2,358 longevity-associated genes onto the human interactome. The analysis showed that genes tied to each hallmark of aging cluster into connected modules, making it possible to calculate how close thousands of existing drugs are to these hallmarks. To refine the search, the team introduced a transcription-based metric called pAGE, which evaluates whether a drug shifts gene expression in ways that counteract age-related changes. Combining network proximity with pAGE, the approach highlights multiple repurposable drugs that not only target hallmarks of aging but also reverse their transcriptional signatures. Importantly, the framework is interpretable, pinpointing the molecular mechanisms for each candidate, offering a systematic, testable way to accelerate drug discovery for longevity. Read More

• Does muscle remember how to stay young?
  A new study unpacks the biology of muscle memory, showing how prior exercise training leaves lasting metabolic imprints that optimize muscle growth upon retraining. Using mice on either a control or obesogenic diet, researchers found that even after detraining, retraining restored muscle fiber size and shifted fibers toward a more oxidative profile. Transcriptomic and proteomic analyses revealed a strong boost in mitochondrial metabolism: enhanced oxidative phosphorylation genes, increased protein complex IV, sustained citrate synthase activity, and greater fatty acid oxidation capacity. Interestingly, while gene-level changes were similar across diets, protein-level differences hinted at complex layers of regulation. Overall, the findings suggest that the “memory” of exercise is written into mitochondrial programming, allowing skeletal muscle to override dietary challenges and re-ignite growth, offering a potential mechanism to counter-act age-related muscle decline. Read More

MEDIA STACK 💡

• The cowboy of generic drugs by Alex Kesin, a great review of the book on how Eli Hurvitz created Teva Pharmaceuticals

• Anatomy of a Biotech Failure’s Part 2 from age1. Find

...