AgeCurve wins £250k to advance nextgen ageing diagnostic device
The industry-developed Cell Tree Rings tracker promises to deliver a smarter, cheaper way of measuring scalable single cell somatic mutation burden and more accurately pinpoint biological age for improved clinical longevity interventions.
The funding, which has come from a private Central European investment firm, will be used to achieve three milestones – to develop a licensable Cell Tree Rings product for the ageing diagnostics sector, for ageing therapeutics and for cell therapy.
AgeCurve founder and CEO, Attila Csordas says: “We have an evolutionary method through the cell trees to measure, in an unbiased way, the somatic mutation burden that accumulates with age, even in healthy people.
“Our comprehensive system works as a human single cell somatic mutation tracker and ageing timer to accurately pinpoint biological age at the fundamental genome instability level, and help build future ageing clocks which can better predict life expectancy, morbidity and mortality.
“This is an essential solution which the longevity industry and its private clinics want now – and this knowledge about somatic mutations will contribute meaningfully to new longevity medicines, ageing therapeutics and future geroprotective drugs. And, in five years’ time, demand will be even more widespread.”
Longevity is an emerging industry that aims to bring ageing under medical control using translational geroscience methods and clinical interventions to eliminate debilitating age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Over the last decade, longevity as a field has seen unprecedented scientific progress – and, with people over the age of 50 now the world’s fastest growing demographic, the global longevity market reached $17 trillion in 2019 and is predicted to reach $27 trillion by 2026.
Attila says: “Healthy longevity and translational geroscience (the science of ageing) are not about extending maximum life by any means; they are about extending healthspan so that people are not living compromised lives, challenged by frailty and illness as they grow older – and can continue to enjoy the highest quality of life regardless of age.
“We want to apply a disruptive method which is commercially tied to the most commercially available single cell sequencing platform, and apply it across the whole life sciences ecosystem.
“Right now, we are working on one project to run a beta study for cell therapy application to cut the cost of cell therapy manufacturing, make it safer and possibly improve efficacy too.
“The uses for the Cell Tree Rings are considerable. We can track the clonal history of cells, and it can also be used as a general quality control tool for safe drug efficacy testing.”
Last year, Attila underwent the University of Cambridge’s 12-week entrepreneurship programme, impulse, which helps unique individuals keep focus and turn their innovations or ventures to the point where they can become a viable business.
Attila says: “The impulse programme helped me fine tune my ideas as I prepared to re-establish AgeCurve with a new direction, after initially failing with a DTC proteomic saliva age profiling product - and we have now secured fresh funding and have put together a solid team.”
AgeCurve has filed UK and PCT patents for Cell Tree Rings as a method and cell lineage tree based ageing timer for calculating biological age of a biological sample, and is currently working with the Prague and Florida-based Healthy Longevity Clinic.
To discuss participation in the impulse 2024 programme and for all other enquiries, please email impulse@maxwell.cam.ac.uk. Sponsored Fellowships are available for certain technology and research areas. The deadline for all applications is Sunday 10th March 2024.
• Photograph: AgeCurve Founder and CEO, Attila Csordas. Image courtesy – Kirsten Batcheler/IdeaSpace City
