Insilico Medicine Forms Industry's First Longevity Board to Guide AI Drug Discovery
Insilico Medicine announced the creation of a Longevity Board on Tuesday, assembling senior scientists and executives to oversee research into aging-related drug targets. The board will direct work on biomarkers of aging, identify therapeutic targets that address both disease and aging processes, and validate treatments against hallmarks of aging using AI-driven methods.
Andrew Adams, Group Vice President of Molecular Discovery at Eli Lilly, will chair the board. His appointment marks a direct connection between longevity research and pharmaceutical scale-up-a gap that has historically separated academic aging science from commercial drug development.
Bridging Research and Manufacturing
Adams has become a visible voice in aging research. His keynote at the Aging Research and Drug Discovery conference raised a specific question: whether GLP-1 drugs represent the first class of longevity therapeutics. His expertise in genetic medicine design and large-scale R&D operations positions him to translate Insilico's experimental compounds into drugs that mainstream healthcare systems can actually deploy.
The board also includes Michael Levitt, the 2013 Nobel laureate in chemistry who has advised Insilico since 2014, along with company co-CEOs Alex Zhavoronkov and Feng Ren. Denitsa Milanova, founder and CEO of Medici Therapeutics, and C.Y. Leung, a healthcare partner at Value Partners, round out the initial membership.
A Shift in Aging Research Strategy
Longevity research is not new. Scientists in the 1990s explored telomerase activation and stem cell approaches to target aging directly. Today's wave of biotech companies takes a different path: they develop drugs for aging-related diseases first-obesity, muscle atrophy, metabolic disorders, fibrosis, anemia, cancer-then explore whether those same drugs modulate fundamental aging processes.
Insilico uses generative AI to identify dual-purpose targets positioned at the intersection of chronic disease and biological aging. This allows the company to develop treatments that address immediate clinical needs while potentially slowing underlying aging mechanisms.
Levitt described the approach in concrete terms: "Aging is not a single problem-it is a deeply interconnected web of molecular and cellular processes. Only by targeting that complexity systematically, with AI tools sophisticated enough to map it, do we have a realistic chance of extending healthspan."
Insilico's Track Record
Insilico has published over 50 papers on aging, biomarkers, and therapeutic targets. The company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2025 under the code 3696.HK. Its drug pipeline addresses fibrosis, oncology, immunology, pain, obesity, and metabolic disorders.
The company's focus on longevity dates to its founding. In 2015, Zhavoronkov posed a question at the NVIDIA GTC conference that captured the moment: "Can NVIDIA cure aging?" The Longevity Board represents a concrete answer-not whether it's possible, but how to organize the work.
For researchers and scientists working in this space, understanding AI applications in science and research has become essential to evaluating both the promise and the practical constraints of AI-driven drug discovery.
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