Alex Zhavoronkov | How to build a sustainable longevity company
Biotech and Health Extension Group
How to build a sustainable longevity company
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Bio: Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder, CEO and CBO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com, HKEX:3696), a leading clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation generative artificial intelligence and automation platforms for drug discovery. Since 2014, he has invented critical technologies in the field of generative artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning (RL) for the generation of novel molecular structures with the desired properties and the generation of synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered the applications of GANs, transformers, and other deep learning technologies for the prediction of human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. Under his leadership, Insilico raised over $530 million in multiple rounds from expert biotechnology, healthcare, and financial investors, opened R&D centers in 8 countries and regions, and partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions. In 2025, the company completed the largest biotech IPO in Hong Kong raising over $300 million. Since 2021, the company nominated more than 27 preclinical candidates, 11 reached clinical stage, and 1 program with a novel target and novel molecule completed Phase IIa in IPF with favorable safety, tolerability and encouraging dose-dependent efficacy. By 2023, 11 out of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies used a part of the Pharma.AI software suite.
Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (GPU company acquired by AMD). Since 2012, he has published over 310 peer-reviewed research papers with over 30 papers in the field of generative adversarial networks, generative reinforcement learning, and multi-modal transformers, and 3 books, including "The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy" (Macmillan, 2013). He serves on the advisory or editorial boards of Trends in Molecular Medicine, Aging Research Reviews, Aging, and Frontiers in Genetics, and founded and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research and Drug Discovery meeting (12th Annual in 2025), the world's largest event on aging research in the biotechnology industry. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. https://longevitypledge.org/
Biotech and Health Extension Group
A group of scientists, entrepreneurs, funders, and institutional allies who cooperate to advance biotechnology to reverse aging and extend human healthspan.
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