IT entrepreneur Yury Melnichek came up with a way to extend life to 120 years
His company has already concluded deals with several pharmaceutical giants. Here's how anti-aging drugs will work if everything goes according to plan.
IT entrepreneur and venture investor from Belarus Yury Melnichek told in an interview with Elizaveta Osetinskaya's YouTube channel about the biotechnology company Gero, which uses artificial intelligence to try to crack the code of aging.
In 2010, he sold his apartment and turned down a six-figure annual salary at Google to launch Maps.me — an offline map service that became one of the most popular navigators in the world. Later, Melnichek sold several AI projects to Google and Pinterest and founded a venture fund.
Today, one of his boldest bets is Gero: a company that creates anti-aging drugs.
According to him, the main problem with the modern perception of the world is that people consider old age to be the norm.
"Old age is the cause of most diseases now, it is the main cause of people dying on Earth. This is not the norm. The science of longevity defines old age as follows (and I agree with this definition): it is a state where for an individual or for a biological species, the probability of death for any reason increases over time,"
the entrepreneur argues, referring to Gompertz's famous law, according to which after 20 years, a person's probability of death doubles every 8 years. However, there are biological species where this probability does not change. The task of longevity science is to stop this exponential growth of risk.
Melnichek mentions that in 2021, Gero scientists published a groundbreaking article about the natural barrier of human life, which lies in the range between 120 and 130 years. This work even made it to the pages of Popular Mechanics.
According to Melnichek, the first generation of anti-aging drugs should lead precisely to this barrier.
"The first thing we will see is that life expectancy, currently 83 years in developed countries, will reach 120-130 years," the investor is confident.
He emphasizes that theoretically, this shift has already happened — science knows it's possible; the only question remaining is the distribution of the technology.
Not a pill, but an injection
If you imagine anti-aging medication as a magic pill you can take in the morning, you're most likely mistaken. As Melnichek explains, creating a pill has serious limitations due to what's called oral bioavailability — many complex substances simply aren't absorbed through the gut.
Therefore, the future of therapy lies in injections. "It could be an mRNA vaccine, given once a year like a COVID vaccine," says Yury. A similar approach has already become common thanks to the spread of drugs like Ozempic and mRNA technologies.
The company's most advanced project is a vaccine that blocks the accumulation of a specific protein in the body. Artificial intelligence predicted that this particular protein plays a key role in the aging process. If it is removed from the body, people will start to live significantly longer.
To test the hypothesis, scientists conducted experiments on mice. The results were impressive: just one injection extended the rodent's life by 20-25%. But the main thing Melnichek emphasizes is the quality of life.
"It extended the healthy, vigorous part of life, when the mouse is still curious, looks good, moves quickly," he notes.
However, as the entrepreneur regrettably observes, the mice from the test group that survived and rejuvenated had to be euthanized according to protocol so that pathologists could study their organs.
"And then the pathologist saw that their internal organs were also like those of young mice," Melnichek recounts.
To the question of what this formula is, the entrepreneur jokingly replied:
"It's a six-letter word that names which protein needs to be removed from circulation in the body for the biological species Homo sapiens and many other mammals to live much longer."
Deal with a Japanese pharmaceutical giant
As Melnichek explains, Gero is primarily a computational company, not a classic pharmaceutical manufacturer. Laboratory research is outsourced.
Gero sells its discoveries to major players. This was the case with this drug: it was sold to the largest Japanese company Chugai Pharmaceuticals, a controlling stake of which belongs to the Swiss giant Roche.
"They bought knowledge," Melnichek explains. "A six-letter word plus a lot of explanatory documentation." Essentially, the Japanese acquired the right to develop the drug based on Gero's AI models.
The deal provides for staged payments totaling $250 million as certain key performance indicators (KPIs) are met. The first payment has already been received after signing the contract. The next tranche is expected when the Japanese laboratory independently replicates the experiment results.
Melnichek himself, through his family office Melnichek Investments, has invested a total of about $5.5 million in the company. The investor draws attention to the royalty clause of the contract: Gero will receive 4 to 6 percent of the drug's revenue, and this amount has no upper limit.
However, the release of the finished drug to the market is still very far off. If the results are confirmed, a lengthy period of regulatory trials will begin: first, the drug will be retested on mice, and then on a second species of mammals. Only after the successful completion of these stages will the path to human clinical trials open.
According to Melnichek, this process is traditionally divided into three phases. First, safety is checked. Then comes the phase of testing efficacy on a small group of patients, and finally, a large-scale third phase, the goal of which is to prove the drug's action on a large sample and create a simple prescription algorithm for doctors. Only after overcoming all these barriers does the drug go on sale in key markets.
Two scenarios of aging
Reflecting on the biology of aging, Yury Melnichek points out that two fundamentally different aging strategies exist in nature.
As the first scenario, Melnichek cites mice, which die from their very first illness. Their bodies are not designed to resist.
The second scenario is so-called negligible senescence, demonstrated by naked mole rats. These amazing creatures live about 30-40 years, which is incredibly long for a rodent of their size.
"We don't see their probability of death increasing with age," the entrepreneur asserts. At 30 years old, a mole rat has the same chances of dying (from injury or infection) as at 1 year old.
As Melnichek claims, humans age in a similar way to mice when they become very old. Humans resist for a long time thanks to their restorative powers. The turning point for people comes after 65 years (later with a healthy lifestyle).
The goal of the new drug is not just to treat diseases, but to "turn back the age counter" so that the body does not enter this "mouse scenario" and remains in a state of high self-repair capability.
Injections of the new drug will need to be administered to people after 65 years of age.
"This is not a drug that suppresses the gradual decline of the body; it is rather one that reverses human frailty,"
the entrepreneur argues, mentioning a Gero study published in 2021.
This scientific work identified a fundamental limit to longevity. Analyzing vast arrays of anonymized medical data and fitness tracker metrics, researchers studied a parameter called the body's recovery rate after stress (illness or physical exertion).
The mathematical model showed an inexorable pattern: if a person recovers quickly in youth, this period extends with age. In middle age (around 40 years), returning to normal after an illness like COVID takes about two weeks. However, the recovery curve steadily approaches a critical point.
Calculations showed that in the range between 120 and 130 years, the time required for recovery becomes infinite. This means a complete loss of the body's resilience. According to the investor, it is to this limit that people will be able to live thanks to the first generation of the future drug.
Why the company bought human blood
To calculate the biological mechanisms of aging and find that coveted protein, theoretical models alone were insufficient. As Melnichek recalls, at the initial stage of the company's development, Gero purchased human blood samples from laboratories. It was critically important to find samples taken from the same person, but with a difference of at least 5 years. Only such "pairs" allowed tracking the real dynamics of changes in the body.
Frozen samples underwent complex proteomic analysis, which calculated the concentration of thousands of different proteins. The goal was to find those whose behavior changes linearly with age.
It was this meticulous blood analysis that allowed the calculation of candidates for the role of the "counter protein," whose blocking later yielded fantastic results in mouse experiments.
Now, Melnichek claims, physical blood purchases are almost unnecessary — technologies allow making similar discoveries based on digital data from electronic medical records.
AI model that predicts your next illness
As Melnichek recounts, in addition to research in life extension, his team has created a unique platform that "is good at separating aging and diseases, and from this, finds drugs for aging and for age-related diseases. (...) The Gero model predicts the next illness in a person's medical record," the entrepreneur explains.
This system analyzes medical history and correlates it with genetic data. If the model errs in its prediction for a specific person, scientists look at how their genetics differ from others. This is how, according to Melnichek, genes and proteins responsible for the development of diseases and aging are found.
Partnership with Pfizer
An ideal example of how longevity science tries to coexist with classical pharmacology was Gero's deal with the giant Pfizer. As Melnichek recounts, it all began with the need for big data.
As the investor explains, Pfizer provided access to tens of millions of electronic medical records of Americans in 2022, on which Gero employees trained their model. In exchange for the data, the pharmaceutical giant had a specific interest - to find a means to combat fibrosis (pathological overgrowth of connective tissue in the lungs or liver, resembling scar formation).
The problem with fibrosis is that it is a typical age-related disease. If you simply search for its causes using machine learning, algorithms yield many genes related to general aging, which act very slowly. However, Pfizer, like any pharmaceutical company, needed "fast" targets — proteins whose targeting solves the problem here and now.
According to Melnichek, the Gero team managed to solve this problem by mathematically "subtracting" the aging process from the equation.
"We gave them the targets, meaning [we identified] which proteins need to be attacked, which [are] very close to fibrosis. And we kept for ourselves the model for finding the slowest mechanisms that underpin aging," the entrepreneur reveals details of the deal.
Why preventive medicine is useless to anyone
Explaining why such a division was necessary, Melnichek touched upon a fundamental problem of modern medicine: big business is not interested in creating drugs that prevent diseases long before they appear.
"Imagine there's a pill: if a patient takes it for a year, they will never get fibrosis. Such a pill is useless to anyone. A pill is needed when the patient is already ill," he categorically states.
The reason, according to the investor, lies in how the market is structured: a person goes to the doctor with a specific problem, gets a prescription, and the insurance company pays for the treatment. Selling preventive remedies is difficult both from the standpoint of proving their necessity and from sales themselves.
Next goal — delaying menopause
In the interview, Yury Melnichek announced another ambitious direction of Gero's work, which could revolutionize women's health. The company has an agreement with a specialized investment fund that is ready to finance the search for a drug to delay menopause. The work scheme here resembles venture capital: partners allocate money for each subsequent stage of experiments, provided that the previous one was successful.
The scientific hypothesis of the project is based on separating two different mechanisms from each other. As Melnichek explains, in the female body, there are normal periodic processes (menstrual cycle), superimposed on which is a very weak and slow process of reproductive system aging, which breaks down over time.
The task of scientists is to isolate this slow degradation and find a way to stop it. "If we can find how to 'target' it with drugs, then it will be a drug that delays menopause," the investor says.
He admits that the team is still at an early stage: there is no finished drug yet, but there are good hypotheses about which genes and proteins are responsible for this malfunction.
How easy will it be to sell Gero
Responding to the comment that Gero looks like a "project for life," which, unlike Melnichek's previous IT startups, would hardly be quickly and profitably sold to a strategic investor, the entrepreneur expressed the opposite opinion.
He is confident that there will be no problems finding a buyer: any major pharmaceutical corporation could acquire Gero as a ready-made research center. However, the investor emphasizes that at this stage, he has no such desire.
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