The Bioinformatics CRO Podcast

Transcript of Episode 69: David Scieszka

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain errors.

Grant Belgard: Welcome to the Bioinformatics CRO podcast. I’m your host, Grant Belgard. Today we’re speaking with Dr. David Scieszka, founder and CEO of Vertical Longevity Pharmaceuticals, AKA VeLo Pharma. David’s team is pioneering a first-in-class senolytic vaccine that teaches the immune system to clear senescent cells, those dysfunctional zombie cells that accumulate with age. With a PhD in biomedical sciences, an MBA, and even a stint as a U.S. Army PSYOP specialist, David brings a uniquely interdisciplinary lens to the quest for longer, healthier lives. We’ll dive into how VeLo’s platform could reverse atherosclerosis, where the company sits in the fast-moving longevity landscape, David’s winding path from scientist to biotech CEO, and the advice he wishes he’d had earlier. David, welcome to the show.

David Scieszka: Thanks, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Grant Belgard: So in 60 seconds, what problem is VeLo solving and how?

David Scieszka: That’s a good question. To be more specific than I usually am, we are initially targeting the disease of atherosclerosis, and we’re doing so by targeting a fundamental driver of aging. And so we can potentially unclog the arteries that have already been clogged, which is something that people are trying to do right now, but to this day, no one has been able to do yet. And so one of the things on our platform, we are targeting those zombie cells like you’re talking about. And from that, we can have multi-disease capabilities where we can intervene not only in atherosclerosis, that’s just the first step. Our larger goal is to impact healthspan, the number of healthy years that you’re alive. If we can extend that for every human on the planet, we’re in a really good spot, but we have to initially focus on atherosclerosis. So that’s the key that we’re targeting first.

Grant Belgard: The term senolytic vaccine is unfamiliar to many. Can you break down the mechanism in lay terms?

David Scieszka: Yes, absolutely. So like you said, a lot of people like to attribute senescent cells to zombie cells. They are pro-inflammatory, they can cause localized tissue dysfunction, but they also feed forward the senescence phenotype. So they excrete pro-inflammatory molecules, both locally, and then those pro-inflammatory molecules enter your circulation, those go systemic. And so they transform other senescent cells all across the body. There’s a low level of these in every single cell type that we can study, including neurons. But the senescent cells themselves, being hallmark of aging, causing that tissue dysfunction, there’s of course going to be a therapeutic push to clear them out. And that approach is called a senolytic approach. It’s a little bit of a misnomer. It’s actually the apoptosis or apoptosis approach rather than an actual lysis, because that would cause even more inflammation.

David Scieszka: So it really is activating that mechanism of self-death. That natural process is a senolytic approach. So people have tried with dasatinib, quercetin. Many different senolytic approaches are being investigated currently, but they suffer from dose dependent toxicity, off target effects, and sometimes limited efficacy. And so finding the right antigen to target or the right marker to be able to intervene at is critically important so that you’re not harming healthy cells as well as senescent cells. And that’s been a real push in the senescence field recently. The vaccine approach is to basically engage your immune system to clear out these aberrant cells, these pathologic cells, allowing your immune system to do the work for you, which is hopefully seen as a positive approach as opposed to a potentially hazardous one, because you have to select the right antigen, absolutely.

Grant Belgard: Could you tell us about your preclinical mouse data?

David Scieszka: Yeah, absolutely. So pre-clinically, we have investigated the vaccine on a standard black six model. So this is a mouse model, an aged model. So it was aged 18 months naturally, and then we vaccinated. We did that, we selected that age point, because if it works at that age, we know it’ll work at every age before that as well. Things like thymic and dilution, where your thymus is degrading with age so that your immune system is responding less robustly. So we selected the 18-month-old time point, and then we vaccinated, monitored, monitored lung function, so heart and lung function, and then visually as well, multiple different metrics. It was really surprising the responses that we found. Not only did we see healthspan and lifespan extension, that was pretty expected. We also saw hair loss recovery, which is expected. That’s known in the senescence field.

David Scieszka: Qualitatively arthritic reductions, that was not expected for me. We also saw cardiovascular rejuvenation. That was really unexpected. We, as a scientist, I always am pleasantly surprised when experiments go well, and incredibly excited when things go better than planned. And so we expected the heart function to decline at the same rate as normal aging. We didn’t expect that the senescent cells would be having that drastic of effect, but we rejuvenated the heart to a younger time point based off the parameters, and incredible results. So now we’re focused on atherosclerosis because of the potential impact on humans as well. But yeah, I could go on about the beta too, but happy to talk to anybody who’s interested in reaching out to me as well.

Grant Belgard: And for listeners who are interested in reaching out to you and following VeLo Pharma, how should they do that?

David Scieszka: I’m on LinkedIn all the time. I try to connect with as many people as possible there. My inbox on email is always inundated, so it’s much easier to connect with me via LinkedIn. And I’ve got a unique last name, so I’m gonna be, if not the only David Scieszka, one of the only David Scieszkas on LinkedIn. So it’ll be pretty easy to find me, I think.

Grant Belgard: And where does VeLo sit relative to other longevity players? What differentiates a vaccine approach from small molecule senolytics?

David Scieszka: Yeah, the small molecule senolytics, right? So specifically talking about like, Dasatinib, dasatinib is a different mechanism. And also don’t mean to inundate people with weird terms, but like cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors, cell cycle processes, P53, if you’re familiar with cancer. And so those are messing around with the internal metrics of a cell. We’re trying to go after a surface protein after it has transformed senescence. So whereas a lot of people are concerned with the senolytic approaches like Novidoclax, like Unity Biotechnology’s previous approaches, because there is an inherent cancer risk. If you’re messing around with the nucleus, if you’re messing around with the internal processes, we might be stopping the senescence transformation process.

David Scieszka: We’re going downstream of that post-senescence transformation, only killing the senescence cells after they have since transformed. And so I would argue that this is a much safer approach than all previous approaches, and especially by selecting an antigen that is all eyes to a few specific processes on the surface of proteins, as opposed to a much broader antigen. We have selected a very safe way to move forward in the senolytic space. Again, that’s just my argument.

Grant Belgard: At what point did you select atherosclerosis as your first indication? Was that after you got back the mouse data?

David Scieszka: It was, so that’s an interesting one. If you look at the data, I have a background as a computational biologist as well. If you follow the data, it’s much more cash efficient to go chronic kidney disease. Senescent cells have been implicated in chronic kidney disease. There’s even clinical trials right now against senescent cells using piscidibic trisetin. That’s a cash efficient way to get to market, but we went through what’s called the I-Corps program, which is in three months you interview 100 people, including KOLs, doctors, people on the street. From that, I actually had that as part of my AD testing. Are you more excited about a vaccine that targets chronic kidney disease, or are you more excited about a vaccine that can unclot arteries, and resounding response from doctors and people alike was atherosclerosis. It wasn’t even a comparison.

David Scieszka: And so the data, we have to follow the data absolutely. We could have generated primary data on chronic kidney disease. Instead, we reallocated those dollars to echocardiograms and the cardiovascular measures because we anticipated the product market fit really. So it was truly an internal strategy from the get-go. How do we find the best niche to fill?

Grant Belgard: Can you outline the next 18 months for us on your roadmap?

David Scieszka: Yes, for the next 18 months, it’s all fundraising. No, just kidding, but it’s definitely a big part of it. We are fundraising currently. As soon as we receive sufficient funding, we can engage in primate study, which is going to be incredibly translational. I would say we’re partnering with academics right now and also trying to open up conversations with the NIH. Part of what’s akin to their tech transfer office, so that we’re trying to get our vaccine in the hands of investigators who have the animal models to be able to test this out in their different indications and their different ideas. So we have on the horizon a vaccine study in primates that can measure whether or not it works. And of course it will, because we know the protein exists in monkeys and humans. That’s been known for a long time. We have to validate it, show that proof of concept.

David Scieszka: In 18 months, depending on funding, we can initiate manufacturing and we can do both of our toxicology. So taking a step back, there’s steps that you have to go through before you get your drug approved. And part of that is doing toxicology. Part of that is doing manufacturing. Those are the less exciting, a little bit boring aspects of it, but that’s part of the process. So we can definitely do that in the next 18 months. And as well, we can get translational primate study done. So basically we, in the next 18 months, we could have everything ready for our submission to the FDA.

Grant Belgard: Best case scenario, how do you envision VeLo contributing to a reduction of morbidity?

David Scieszka: Like what are the next steps beyond that? Yes, if we were on the market today, best case scenario, we would be able to reverse atherosclerosis to the point where another organ system would fail first. And that would be the extension of health span. So we would be pushing out [?], longevity, escape velocity. We’d be pushing out that lifespan and health span a couple of years, and then a new organ would fail. And hopefully our vaccine is also able to positively impact that organ, say the kidneys, or say metabolic dysfunction associated with a different type of disorder. If we have the capabilities to impact that, then we’re doing multiple interventions simultaneously. We just have to make sure that we’re showing that through testing.

David Scieszka: And then afterwards, in the sense of where we find ourselves in the landscape, we’re going to transition this from an injectable into an oral formulation, because our vaccine platform has to produce this in a pill form that is shelf stable, greater than six months. So we can go into the driest deserts, the wettest jungles. We can get this in the hands of everybody. As soon as we show it’s safe, we can get this in the hands of everybody and at extremely reduced cost. And that’s part of the strategy that we have too. We intentionally chose our platform because it is safe and cheap to produce. We want this therapy to go completely different way than say CAR T-cell therapy, where it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is insufficient in my future. I will not be a part of it. It’s a great approach, don’t get me wrong.

David Scieszka: It needs to happen so that we can find better alternatives though. We chose our vaccine platform for the people. We want this to be in the hands of all, democratizing the longevity process. And that’s the longer vision of VeLo Pharma.

Grant Belgard: So you were a US Army PSYOP specialist before grad school. How did that shape your worldview and how you approached VeLo Pharma?

David Scieszka: It was an incredible opportunity, an incredibly formative process. The resilience that I gained to team management, leadership that I know many people don’t go that route and they’re afraid of what the US military does and can do. And I want to say that it’s not necessarily all that way. There are great guys there. They are doing their jobs and what you learn along the way is so beneficial. I learned philosophy before I joined the army. And then I kept reading philosophy up until this day. It reinforced many philosophical principles like you work faster and better in a team. Things like if you have the right tools at your disposal, you can be a force multiplier instead of an individual. So team leadership, facilitating, giving people the right tools in order to empower them to be better on your team. All of these different things.

David Scieszka: It was an opportunity just as a young man to solidify about a foundation of hard work, resilience, stick-to-it-iveness, and an ability to think on your feet. But outside of that, it actually, it inspired me to join biotech. We were on a deployment in the Philippines, which doesn’t get better than that, right? But we were interviewing local populations. We were census takers, basically, and [?] specialists in that deployment. We would ask, where are your hospital schools and supplies? And do you need more of them? And so then we were finding from our census, if I investigated this rural area and found a guy who was, say, 40 years old, he would look like he was 50. And then if we go into the city where hospitals are everywhere, I would ask, are you, okay, what age are you? He would say 30, and he would look like he was in his 20s.

David Scieszka: So he would look younger than he appeared, and it was access to healthcare, access to simple things like toothbrush, toothpaste, good food. And so that was my inspiration into aging, really, was through the army and as well into biotech, because I thought, wow, there’s a real-world example where we can intervene in biology and see this effect. It was, yeah. I know not everyone who’s in the military has just any experience, but for me, it was absolutely incredible, one of the more formative ones in my life.

Grant Belgard: And can you tell us about your decision to do both a PhD and an MBA, why you did that and at what point? Decided you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

David Scieszka: Yeah, it was during grad school. Wanted to do an MD/PhD route as part of my undergrad. I was in biotech, and I saw that the movers and shakers, a lot of them had a lot of letters after the name, and I came into contact with an MD PhD, my first mentor, actually, Dr. Marcelo Freire, if he’s listening, shout out. Amazing man and a brilliant investigator. But he had an MD PhD, and I wanted to emulate that because of his understanding of physiology and also basic science, spanning the gamut. Got into grad school, got to talking to as many people as I could, and it turns out that I was not looking for an MD, and that was only by the advice of somebody who I deeply respected, a chair of a department, and he said, do you really want to be working on your MD PhD for the next 10, 15 years? You’re gonna have to go into residency after this. You’re gonna have to be patient’s side for several years.

David Scieszka: Are you sure that’s what you’re looking for? And thankfully, he was able to steer me in the right direction. I said, no, I wanna translate science into therapies. That’s what I wanna do. And he said, you’re looking for an MBA. If you can stomach it, you want a PhD MBA. You don’t want an MD PhD. So I took his advice. I’m very coachable in that way that people who have been there, done that, you gotta listen to them. You gotta, as long as they are an expert in their field, I gotta qualify that statement. But yeah, with the respect that I have for him, I listened to his advice, and then I was able to take on the MBA at the same time. It’s always been about saving as many people as possible, intervening in lifespan in as many patients as possible. Yeah, during grad school, I would say is the shorter answer.

Grant Belgard: So we’ve discussed what got you interested in aging and longevity. What specifically convinced you that senescence was the way to go right there?

David Scieszka: There are many approaches within the longevity space, senescence, big one. Yes, it’s as we do when we’re going through advanced degrees, we look very deeply at particular mechanisms, pathways, in this case, hallmarks of aging. And so I did a deep dive. Identity dive into every hallmark that was available at the time that we had because of [Lopez-Otin?] paper. And so I was finding that, of course, they’re all interconnected, mitochondria, nutrient dysregulation, but I found a through-line reactive oxygen species that impacted more of the hallmarks than others. And then there was an obvious phenotype associated with it called senescence. So when we think about [?], aberrant [?] causing DNA damage, aberrant [?] causing misfolding, things of that nature, nutrient dysregulation, surface receptor dysregulation, a lot of it stems from inflammation.

David Scieszka: And so then taking a look at what senescent cells do, inside the cells, there are these lysosomes that are filled with acid. And when they permeable out, that acid leaks out and it affects, well, cytosolic pH, of course, but as well, it hits the DNA. It goes and hits every organelle and it starts having proteins misfolded. And so the senescent cells seem to be a more fundamental, and I still haven’t found out whether or not there is a more fundamental layer than senescence, but it appears to me that because of the obvious ability to track and target a phenotypic expression of one of these hallmarks of aging, it’s a much simpler intervention to be able to find out is fundamentally driving the others. It’s a much more difficult thing to say, to target a tRNA synthetase inhibitor, although people who are listening should check out Mark McCormick on this.

David Scieszka: He’s doing some great work in that avenue. But if you’re trying to focus on a target, you have to be able to intervene. And for me, the senescence field was a fundamental lifting of other hallmarks of aging and as well.

Grant Belgard: Can you tell us about an early failed experiment or startup lesson that still guides you?

David Scieszka: It’s hard to pick which one because there have been so many. The entrepreneurial process is always iterative. And I think that a lot of our PhD and master’s projects are that way too. And so we learned from an early age in our budding scientific careers, how to bounce back, I would say, from a failed experiment, but learn from it at the same time. From a failed experimental point of view, for this vaccine, surprisingly, we haven’t had any. That I got to knock on wood. But from an entrepreneurial standpoint, there has been numerous. I was initially completely misaligned with investor expectations. I went out too fast. Before I understood the landscape, I would say jumping the gun is something that I try not to do anymore. As an example of what happened, I went out trying to raise $5 million initially.

David Scieszka: I talked to some guy who finally sent me straight and he said, your company right now is not even worth that. You understand that. You would be selling 100% of your company. You would have no ownership of it. And that got me thinking, oh my God, I gotta figure out what this investor landscape looks like. And so then I joined the Life Science Angels, which is an incredible group as well, taught me a lot of both sides of the founder’s side of the table and the founder’s side of the table. And so that was a really great learning experience for that. And then you take that learning and you go out and then you learn where you were wrong again. The second time I went out, I was raising too little money. There were people saying that, oh, you haven’t thought about the long-term trajectory of your company. And it wasn’t that. We were raising in small tranches being say 100K here.

David Scieszka: The next round is gonna be 250K. The next round is gonna be 500K. But that’s completely misaligned with what investors do because it’s just as easy for a small stage investor to write a 250K check as it is for them to write a million dollar check. That’s for them, it requires as much legwork. And so for me to be going out raising 100K, they’re not gonna do it. You need to find a specific localized angel that’s gonna be willing to cut such small of a check. And so it’s a constant iterative improvement but I would say strategize first and then go out as opposed to just going out because you have the action. So try not to jump the gun. That’s gonna be something that sticks with me for a long time.

Grant Belgard: And speaking of fundraising war stories, what’s the hardest lesson you took from the first iteration of your pitch deck?

David Scieszka: I would say [?] is key. It’s the word of the century, especially for entrepreneurs. As a data scientist, I love hearing yes. I love hearing no is fine as long as there’s a reason. And as an experimental scientist too, if we have data to support why yes, and if we have data to support why no, there’s a way forward. But no data is awful. If there’s an experiment that goes haywire and can’t track down why, it’s a wasted effort and a waste of time. And so from our first pitch deck, no’s and then requesting feedback and having radio silence on the other side, that was, it required a different level of self-examination than I’ve had to do up to that point. It had a lot to do with probably what people feel during their master’s and PhDs a lot too, like what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get this done? It’s great science. What am I doing wrong?

David Scieszka: And without the data to support it, it was incredibly difficult, but it took a supportive woman, my wife, she was able to set me straight. And she said, it’s a numbers game. It’s gonna be fine. You gotta stick to your guns. You know this better than anybody. And you know you. If you start trying to change who you are in order to placate to every single person that you meet, and if you just beat yourself over the head over every single set of non-existent data that exists, you’re not gonna get out of this alive. You have to be able to stick to your guns and stick to yourself. So out of the war story, I think actually came some positive growth, but it was, yeah, it was difficult at first.

Grant Belgard: And what role does bioinformatics play in your R&D?

David Scieszka: So far, I haven’t been able to touch R or Python in about a year. And it’s, I wouldn’t say killing me, but I wanna get back to it because of the AI revolution, because of everything that’s on plate right now in silico medicine, everything that’s coming down. It will play a role in the future. I know that to be true because there’s going to be other hallmarks of aging that we can potentially target after this one is commercialized. Right now, we could optimize potentially greater optimization of antigen selection, greater optimization of peptide sequence targeting. That could be a role in the bioinformatics pipeline. That has a lot more to do with the computational modeling, docking, as opposed to what I’m more familiar with, which is omics, multi-omic analysis and integration. And as well, I’m sure that’s something that you do all the time.

David Scieszka: But yeah, I would say less now, even with this agentic tidal flow that we impending see on the horizon, but that’s a misnomer in itself. And I don’t need to get off on a tangent there, but as far as I can tell, and as far as all the companies that I’ve seen, this agentic revolution is not as close as it may appear. So far as I could tell anyway, we are several years out. And even for simpler tasks, it’s been interesting to see some of the companies that made waves earlier in the year by laying off relatively low-skill staff to replace them with agentic AI has been quietly rolling that back as it hasn’t panned out as well as they had hoped.

David Scieszka: Yeah, and I feel for those employees, to be honest with you, I know that’s going down a completely different direction but I feel the employees right now who are being subject to this unreasonable layoff system, yeah, okay, you’re on unemployment now, that we should really think about who we’re allowing to have power over these people and how we think about when it’s time to hire an AI, when it’s time to hire a person so that we don’t keep messing with these people. Yeah, hopefully it gets better. Hopefully we come to our senses and not fire people as fast. The hiring system is broken but that’s a different conversation altogether.

Grant Belgard: So if you could replay one career decision, what might you do differently?

David Scieszka: I don’t think I would. And I know that’s an unsatisfying answer for some but we were in the same unit together and I actually asked him that if you could do anything over again, what would you do? And he said, if I do anything different then I’m opening up my future to the unknown. I’m here because of everything I’ve ever done before. And even if I don’t like it, if I don’t like today, there’s still tomorrow. If I don’t like the next week, look at all the good that we’ve done before this. If I say it’s also removing all of the positive momentum that we’ve gained up until this point. And so he said that he wouldn’t change anything. And it took me a while to come around to the idea but I don’t think I would anymore either. I used to think about it. I used to think, oh yeah, I wouldn’t stand up in the middle of class or I wouldn’t forget this at that time, but it forms us.

David Scieszka: It really is who we are.

Grant Belgard: That’s interesting. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten that answer before. So for PhD trainees eyeing entrepreneurship, what hard skills should they cultivate now?

David Scieszka: I would say self-examination, a thorough ability to understand the self. If, oh, that reminds me of a quote. I don’t remember him, but he’s a prominent entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. And he said, entrepreneurship is the worst thing that I’ve ever done. I don’t know why people do it. I will never do it again. And so that kind of implies the difficulties that are facing a lot of people who are getting into this. The intrinsic motivation needs to be high, the compulsion or the specific focus or whatever it is that gets you up in the morning and keeps you up at night. If that’s a driving force behind entrepreneurship or your specific focus or your specific task, then it’s definitely worth it. And you have to know yourself to be able to know if that’s true, because a lot of the times external influences can be confused with internal motivations.

David Scieszka: So a lot of people are fronted with, I’m a broke grad student. If only I had an additional 40K a year, I’d be doing better. It’s not necessarily going to help to have more money either. So if we can separate this internal motivation from external inputs as data guy, if we could do that, then we can have a greater understanding of what really needs to happen before we even jump into the entrepreneurship idea to strategize initially. Don’t jump the gun to be able to say, okay, this is a good fit for me. And that’s true of most things. I don’t know how you feel about that, but I would think that understanding what you’re good at, what you want to be good at, where the market’s going, because we’ve seen things like, oh, autophagy wasn’t a big thing until there was a Nobel Prize for it. And so people who were studying autophagy back in what, the 60s, they had no grant funding whatsoever.

David Scieszka: So if you’re studying a process that isn’t hot and it won’t be hot, you’re facing an uphill battle, are you willing to fight that hill? If you aren’t, if it’s not those things, if it doesn’t check those boxes, then it might not be worth it. But it all comes from Socrates’ self-examination. It all comes from self-examination and it’s a real understanding of soul.

Grant Belgard: So regarding building an interdisciplinary team, what do you look for in the first 10 hires?

David Scieszka: I’m gonna quote another person that I wish I was as smart enough as him to actually make this quote myself. He said, hire slow fire fast. And that’s not necessarily true, the firing part, but the hiring slow is very true. If you’re looking for a job or a task that needs to be repeated and internal functionality as opposed to external functionality, that could be worth a hire. If you’re looking for something as a one-off or if the tasks aren’t solidified in your mind, then I would not hire yet because it is so critically important. Once you hire somebody, it’s a relationship. I don’t wanna fire somebody. I’ve had to do it before. I still, it keeps me up at night. So hiring slow, find a job that you need that can’t be done externally and then outline those responsibilities and tasks in order to make sure that they’re functional to the organization.

David Scieszka: In the first 10 hires, as critically important as they are, alignment, culture, fit. So the culture is gonna be important for the rest of your organization. And if your first 10 hires aren’t culturally aligned, you’re setting yourself up for a bad culture. I know it’s a business word that a lot of people think, oh, that’s hokey, it’s culture. If you want it as an altruist, I want to set up a culture of people who are morally aligned with what I want my organization to do. If I hire somebody who’s going to a bottom line, dollars are all that matter, it’s going to be culturally misaligned, morally misaligned and ethically misaligned. And so the first 10 people set the culture. And if you want those 10 people to meaningfully follow you through, they have to be aligned with that for sure. So I hope I explained culture at least.

David Scieszka: And then the mission as well and the vision and the functionality. So I hired our CSO because she did her PhD on our specific vaccine platform. But that was after I had gone through another 10 people who I could tell were just not there. They wanted to commercialize this and then exit immediately. For people who don’t know, that means get out and take basically your bankroll. So get paid as fast as possible. That’s not who I want. I want somebody who’s in this for the long haul. I want somebody who’s in this because they care about humanity. And so that’s when I found our CSO and that’s the kind of all things fell into place. So it takes a long time. It takes a lot of legwork. I don’t know if you probably have some insights on this too because you’ve actually hired probably quite a few people and maybe some of them better than others. I don’t need to call it out like that, but it’s hard.

David Scieszka: It’s definitely hard and it takes a lot of time but a good hire is definitely worth it I would say. What do you, I don’t know, what do you think?

Grant Belgard: Yeah, I totally agree. And culture I would say would be up there for me as well because as the organization grows larger the culture starts to get out of your hands and becomes in the hand, it gets in the hands of your early hires who are more directly interacting on a day-to-day basis with your next 10, 20, 50 employees. So yeah, couldn’t agree more. So longevity is hot but crowded. How should founders pick a viable niche?

David Scieszka: I’m gonna have to quote Matt Kaeberlein on this one. That’s somebody who actually remember Matt Kaeberlein he says that longevity is like, or the hallmarks of aging is like longevity under a lamppost where we focus on what we can see, what’s outlined for us. And so if you, well the analogy is to take a step back. If you drop your keys in the dark and then all of a sudden you start looking for your keys where there’s light shining, it makes absolutely no sense. And so it’s probably based off of an old cartoon like, oh, I can see over here, but my keys are over there. It doesn’t make sense. And so in the longevity space, if you have a hot new thing that is specifically targeting a hallmark of aging and it’s defensible, I’d say go for it.

David Scieszka: Even as crowded as it is, if you can find a niche within that, that you are either better for some reason, more defensible than somebody for some reason, or you’re potentially your AI modeling who’s going to outpace the next AI modeler, I’d say go for it. The fear is that we get outpaced by somebody else and what a terrible life it would be if we had never tried. So I think that going for it, even in a crowded space, if that’s what you found you’re the best at, I would still do it. So senolytic spaces, the crowded, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because we found a better antigen on a different realm. If you find something that’s not in the hallmarks of aging, but you think that it is, by God, go for it. There’s two organelles. There’s an organelle that we’ve never really talked about called The Vault. It’s got an HDAC.

David Scieszka: It’s got a DNA repair system in it and it’s got a telomere extension system in it. The Vault, look it up. We don’t talk about it in longevity. Nobody does. We didn’t even talk about it in Bio 101 because we don’t really know what it does. If you’re studying something out there that nobody really talks about and you think it has a relevance to longevity, go for it. Same thing with that other organelle that I can’t even remember now. There’s two of them that recently came up that we never learned of in Biology 101 and now people are hopefully studying it, but same thing. If you find yourself in a position where tangentially you’re related to longevity and you can see yourself impacting a disease as opposed to aging, that still helps span too. Absolutely go for it. I would recommend everybody pursue their dreams regardless of whether or not it’s a crowded space, as long as it’s defensible.

David Scieszka: I don’t want to tell anybody to say, go waste 10 years of their lives.

Grant Belgard: What’s one bold prediction you have for the longevity sector over the next 10 years?

David Scieszka: I am one of those crazy guys that thinks longevity, escape velocity is nigh. I really believe it. I think that our senolytic vaccine is going to be able to push the boundary of lifespan and healthspan by at least five years. I do believe that. There are directives right now. The ARPA-8 is one of them. They want you to be able to, and also Peter Diamandis’ directive as well, they’re trying to help you reverse age by 20 years. Jeez, if you’re talking about sarcopenia, God, there are so many companies right now and there are shots on goal, to quote Mitch from Ora Biomedical, there are shots on goal for the longevity field that are getting FDA approval right now. And so we’re going to be able to extend healthspan by a couple of years. And then the next therapy is going to extend by a couple of years.

David Scieszka: And then we might be the last generation to have to choose whether or not we expire naturally. That is an incredible thing. I know it’s bold. And I know that I don’t have the data to back it up, but it’s fun. It’s fun to think about the possibility that what if our parents can live forever? What if they get to choose? What if we get to live forever? We could choose. So hopefully my prediction holds true, but that’s a longevity escape velocity in the next.

Grant Belgard: I did ask for a bold prediction. What closing advice would you have? Write this on a sticky note above your desk. What would you suggest?

David Scieszka: Either “you’re worth it” or “you’ve got this” because it’s hard. It’s a hard world out there and I hope it gets better. But right now, going through master’s, PhD, undergrad, it’s easy to view the world as sharp. And it’s easier still to look at a crutch, say a bottle or something like that. And maybe it’ll soften the world for a duration of time. But as soon as you let go of that crutch, you can face it. You’ve got this.

Grant Belgard: Where can our listeners follow your work and keep up with VeLo Pharma?

David Scieszka: Yeah, I gotta do a better job than this. And actually we should probably connect after this and maybe [?] or if you have any recommendations. So I’m trying to build up the LinkedIn. You can definitely follow us on there. We have at least a landing page. We’ve got a website, vertical-longevity-pharma.com with dashes in between the letters. We’re going to be starting up revamping our media presence with updates, especially fundraising updates, progress points, things of that nature. Yeah, if you wanted to reach out to me personally, I’m just a guy just like everybody else. Happy to talk to you. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for advice or if you feel like you can help me. I’m a big believer of the mantra, find somebody to help and repeat. And so if you need help and I can help you, reach out. If you think you can help, I’m happy to reciprocate.

David Scieszka: So yeah, find us on LinkedIn, find VeLo Pharma on LinkedIn, Vertical Longevity Pharma. You can find us on now, hopefully Twitter in the future. Yeah, that’s probably the best.

Grant Belgard: Well, David, thank you so much for joining us.

David Scieszka: Thanks for having me. This has been a load of fun.