Reversing Aging: Screening, Wearables & What To Do Now

When I sit down with Sergey Young, I’m always struck by the balance he brings. He’s deeply embedded in the future of longevity science, yet he champions the fundamentals we already know work: nutrition, exercise, sleep, purpose, and medical screening. For me, that’s a powerful reminder that as functional medicine practitioners, we already have the tools to help patients live longer, healthier lives.

What excites me in this conversation is how Sergey shows us that the technologies on the horizon, including AI drug discovery, blood-based cancer tests, organ regeneration, and wearables, are making these solutions more affordable, more immediate, and more engaging for our patients. This isn’t just a distant dream. It’s a glimpse of where medicine is heading, and we are well positioned to lead the way. ~DrKF

Reversing Aging: Screening, Wearables & What To Do Now

In this episode of New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, longevity investor Sergey Young, founder of the Longevity Vision Fund and XPRIZE board member, joins Dr. Kara Fitzgerald to discuss the latest breakthroughs shaping the future of longevity science and healthy aging.

Sergey shares how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing drug discovery, accelerating research in heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and neurodegenerative disorders. He also explores how emerging technologies, like blood-based diagnostics, organ regeneration, and wearable health monitoring, are making longevity medicine more affordable and accessible than ever.

Finally, Sergey outlines his five-part framework for healthy longevity, emphasizing the power of annual medical screenings, real-time data tracking, and patient-centered decision-making in extending both lifespan and healthspan.

In this episode of New Frontiers, learn about:

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Hi everybody. Welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine. And of course, today is no exception. In this conversation, I sit down with my dear friend and colleague, Sergey Young. He’s the founder of the Longevity Vision Fund, and he’s a board member of the XPrize. He’s somebody who’s deeply knowledgeable in shaping the future of longevity science worldwide. This original conversation was recorded for our masterclass but we had to leave so much juicy content out that we’re bringing it back here in the podcast format so that we can play the bulk of what we talked about.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You’re going to hear about his vision of where the future might be headed for the next generation, some of the next generation ideas around fighting the diseases of aging, where we are with wearables, and what’s happening in the arena of funding innovations in the longevity science space. So take a listen, I’m sure you’re going to enjoy it.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Sergey, it is so fabulous to be with you once again.

Sergey Young: Thank you, Kara. I’m so excited to be here with you today.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Such, such gratitude because you you are, you know, you’re the founder of the Longevity Vision Fund. You are part of the XPRIZE. I mean, you’ve got your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the longevity space globally.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I’ve got so many questions, but your prediction about what the future looks like, something that pops into my head with some degree of regularity and it’s blank, is what is the future is going to look like for my seven-year-old? And you’ve got kids. I’m just curious and I bet you have puzzled on this and it’s not blank for you. I’m curious, you know, what it’s going to look like when she’s an adult.

Sergey Young: Yes. Look, it’s a super interesting question. I’m an investor, so I always say that I have a diversified portfolio for kids. And when I think about their future what is clear is, number one, it’s not just going to be one life cycle. When we were young and even today, our life is split in three different periods: the childhood and study, then the working life, and then retirement or the final part of life. Αnd there’s a lot of fulfillment there as well, But this is like three distinct pieces. When you talk about our kids, they’re going to have a series of mini lives, so every 10 to 20… The quantity of the lifespan and healthspan extension will result in a quality of change, like a step change, of the paradigm of the life cycle. So we’re going to have a series of mini lives. You’re going to have kids from different generations, even with different partners. You’re going to have a number of different careers and study topics. Εvery 15 to 20 years you can basically reset your life. So that I think is important to realize.

Sergey Young: I’m not saying this is good or bad. I’m just saying, evolutionarily, we’ll arrive to this place. That’s number one. Number two, as you know, I’m not a big fan of immortality as a concept, right? I think, in fact, if you take out death from the human life cycle we’re not going to be humans. It’s just a completely different scenario. But what I also know, it’s not like we will have an immortality choice or the point for the future of our case. The future model is going to be about everyone, every five to ten years, making the decision of whether they want to extend their lifespan or not. Okay? So it’s like a series of life extension choices and then the question is, are we ready to make these choices as well, right?

Sergey Young: You know, I’m 53 chronologically, I’m 39 biologically, I’m not sure if it’s going to apply to my lifespan. So I always tend to think like everything I do, I’m doing for the future generations of humans in the best possible way. But this is so clear that everyone would be in control of their own decision to extend their lifespan. And obviously, at a certain point in time, the number of deaths from the age-related diseases is going to be less than 50% in terms of the total number. It’s going to be other reasons why we will cease to exist on this planet. But we’re going to fight these diseases as the reasons for death pretty soon, in evolutionary terms.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Looking at epidemiological data in the US, many of us spend the last 20 years sick with these chronic diseases of aging. When will there be a dent made in that?

Sergey Young: Look, I think it’s important to realize, and I love your question, because we’ve been living as a species for like a million years in this world. So I like the aspiration of making the change in 10 years, but in evolutionary terms, this is still a big deal, time-wise. But I’m a factual guy, probably because of my professional formation of being an investor in longevity. About 90% of deaths after the age of 50 in the US, if you look at the age-related diseases happening because of heart disease, cancer, metabolic/diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases. So let’s just revisit where we are in terms of fighting this. Heart disease, I mean, we’re obviously on the right track to make so many changes in this field, right? It’s always like, if you’re prudent enough, if you do your medical screening every year, you can influence this in a big way. So I think we’re like halfway of fighting heart disease. So that’s one.

Sergey Young: Cancer. We’re right in the middle of winning the war against cancer. I mean, obviously start with the early diagnostics, because if you discover the cancer or condition at this stage one, for a number of cancer types, recovery rates today are anywhere between 93 and 100 percent. And it wasn’t the case when you and I were kids. Having cancer was like the kiss of death. You know that this person will not be with us in the next few months, right? Not anymore. So I think it’s extremely important to recognize this. Then diabetes, metabolic, I mean, it’s both complex and simple, just the whole measurement aspect of it, the GLP-1 drug aspect, the lifestyle and dietary changes aspect. I mean, we are already positioned to win this war, right?

Sergey Young: And then finally, like the only piece of this deadly portfolio, which we still don’t know what we don’t know about, is neurodegenerative diseases. But we just invested in a company, it’s called Verge Genomics, and they use artificial intelligence and proprietary brain tissue bank. I think they have more than 8,000 brain tissue samples to fight neurodegenerative diseases. And think about this figure, they have more than 300 clinical programs against twelve neurodegenerative diseases. This is just one company. Twenty years ago it would have been a group of scientists working on one program against one disease with a 30-year time span. This is how fast computing power and artificial intelligence is now in a position to help us to solve this problem. So I’m not that optimistic for like next year, but I’m super optimistic about the next five, ten, fifteen years

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. Well, and just to kind of leapfrog off of what you’ve just said, Dr. Dale Bredesen is making extraordinary inroads into addressing Alzheimer’s and cognitive impairment using straightforward diet and lifestyle. And you embrace diet and lifestyle probably as richly and you’re as big an advocate for it than perhaps anyone else I know who’s got their hands in the space of these advanced technologies to the extent that you do. You really believe in how important and how powerful it is. The other piece that we really, really need to talk about too is affordability. I mean, the essence of your vision is about not just far-reaching, expensive vision. It’s what we can do right now. I mean, you use the longevity bridge term all the time and I have since incorporated it. I have learned it from you and I use it. So what we can do right now, what works right now, what’s essential right now, and also what’s affordable, not just right now, but in the future? So your anticipation is that this is available to everyone. I want you to talk about what we need to be doing right now and then just talk a little bit about your passion with regard to making this financially reachable.

Sergey Young: Yes, as you know, this is an important part of my, and our, mission for everyone in the field, right? I mean, we don’t have an interest to develop something which would cost millions of dollars and will be available only to the fraction of the population. In fact, it’s just a different game. And I always like when in the audience, I share my mission, which is the mission to change one billion lives, and there’s always going to be someone in the audience saying like, “Sergey, we have like eight billion people on the planet. Why only one billion?” But that’s only on the funny side. I just want to use an example of technologies that we are supporting with the funding from two of our longevity funds, Longevity Vision Fund, that’s an earlier fund and now we are partnering with Peter Diamantis and we started to invest in a new bigger longevity fund called BOLD Longevity Growth.

Sergey Young: Every technology and piece of science that we’re investing in bring ten, twenty, thirty times improvement in terms of cost. This is exciting. The blood-based AI-powered cancer test is now a couple of hundred bucks. Every quarter you can use your blood and detect up to seven different cancer types. Well, think about these two hundred dollars in comparison to the different surgeries and chemotherapies and all the interventions that people do when they catch the cancer in stage three and stage four.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Amazing. Everybody’s going to want to know who that laboratory is.

Sergey Young: Yes, I think there are a number of companies. Forgive me, I’m not that familiar with the consumer side and there’s no way it’s going to be available directly to consumers, so you still need to work through your doctor. But there are a number of companies that are developing this test. One company is called GRAIL. We invested in Freenome early on, and on and on. So I’m very excited that literally, the last three years that I’ve done my medical screening in Fountain Life, the company that we founded together with Peter Diamantis, Tony Robbins, Marc Benioff from Salesforce.com. It was a stool-based test but now I think they’re switching to the blood-based test.

Sergey Young: I think it’s really exciting. And then what else? I shared with you example of the company called Lygenesis using one liver to help 50 plus patients. So that’s decreased from like one million dollars per treatment to twenty to thirty thousand dollars per treatment. That’s exciting as well. What else? Insilico Medicine, the company which used AI to compress drug discovery and development cycle. The first two years of drug discovery they compressed into two months. And think about the average drug development cost today in the US is $6.2 billion at the current prices and it takes 12 years. Think about, you know, what is the economic impact on affordability of drugs to compress? But you know, what is my favorite example is the one with metformin. We still don’t know whether metformin works for everyone or only for part of population, which is in your risk area diabetes-wise.

Sergey Young: You just had a discussion with a very good friend and longevity pioneer near Nir Barzilai and together with American Federation for Aging Research, we’ve been working on the TAME trial to test metformin as a potential repurposed longevity drug. You know what’s the funnest thing? In every trial you need to have a placebo group, which is the pill with zero chemical substance, and you need to have the group which takes metformin. The placebo for this trial is two times more expensive than metformin.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow. Yeah. Isn’t that something?

Sergey Young: Well, metformin has been in production for more than 60 years, it has a relatively safe profile. Again, this is not medical advice. I’m telling you about this study done by scientists and covered and tested by regulators. But in a way, isn’t it funny? The actual drug which has the potential to be approved in 5 to 10 years as a longevity drug, is two times less expensive than placebo. I mean it tells you a lot.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, that’s great. Interventions today, things that we are bullish on today, I want to ask you about.

Sergey Young: In very simple terms, my framework is very much related to yours. So, diet, exercise, sleep/peace of mind. So for me, that’s the sleep and the mental health aspect, meditation, sense of purpose. Doing acts of kindness is very important. These are the three pieces. I always add two. One is medical screening. In fact, the most important day of your life every year these days is not your birthday. Not anymore. It’s the day of your medical screening. I’m not a medical doctor. I’m an investor and I’m saving 15 to 20 lives a year just pushing people to do medical screening. And it’s all the same story. “Sergey, you saved my life. They discovered early stage cancer. I’m fully treated, 100% recovered. I didn’t even lose the quality of my life.” And it’s a touching point and a big piece of my work for me. We’re living in a world where the power of sensors will just help us. My Oura ring would tell me 24 hours before I fell sick because it always says, “Sergey, you have elevated body temperature.” And it starts from there.

Sergey Young: And it’s just such a simple example. You know, I’m so impressed with MRI, which can detect cancer in 99% of cases, and I can go on and on. Okay? So medical screening is super important. So that’s my addition to your lifestyle-driven framework. And then number five is, you know, making wise choices. And it starts from your new philosophy and the mindset of taking back control for our health. Think about the world today. We delegate all our health choices to someone else, you know, Big Pharma, regulators, insurance companies, healthcare providers, Big Food, et cetera. I’m not saying you need to do all of this, right? I’m not competent to make all of this, but you need to be part of this choice. It’s almost like a director for the orchestra. You need to become a director of the orchestra of your own health.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.

Sergey Young: So that’s an important piece. And it comes down sometimes to making very risky decisions. Like, tobacco smoking is minus 10 years from your lifespan. Not using the seatbelt is minus two years from your life. Driving motorcycles is 17 times more mortal than driving the car. And I can go on and on. I have a friend, she lives in California and she’s a brilliant mountaineer. Last two years, she went to two mountains, one is K2, the other one is Annapurna. You know what the mortality rate is for these? Twenty-five and thirty-three percent.

Sergey Young: You know I’m originally from Russia. You know with Russian roulette, when you do it, your chance of dying is one out of six chances. I mean, it’s almost like putting two bullets in a pistol and doing the Russian roulette. This is crazy. And we always think that this is going to happen with someone else. It’s not with us. Like, we are smart and clever, but it’s not the case. So, you need to rethink your risk-return choices in your life. And I think it’s extremely important.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow, yeah, that’s fascinating. Those are so smart, they make so much sense. Yes, our medical screening is indeed one of the most important and powerful things that we can do. Yeah, buckling up. Gosh, it’s so, so basic. I love that you have the stats there. You’re a numbers guy for sure.

Sergey Young: Yeah, I am.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: This is our second, well more than second actually, we had an Instagram Live and then you jumped on our podcast and here we are again. And I think all of these times you are wearing quite a few wearables. I think you actually wear more wearables than anyone I know. You’re bullish on wearables, you invest in wearable companies. What is the state of the state of this technology today and what do you see for the future?

Sergey Young: Sure. Great question as you know I’m big fan of wearables I’m using the Oura ring to measure my sleep time and during the night because it doesn’t have a screen it doesn’t bother me during the night. I’m big fan of Apple watch but actually any smartwatch is helpful. I’m big fan of just measuring my physical activity. In fact if you look at these studies, everyone who is trying to close the circles on devices like Apple watch will add 30 to 40 percent to their physical activity. Sometimes, I arrive home like 10:30 and I’m just finalizing my 10,000 steps a day until midnight. I know statistically it’s actually right after 5.5 or 6,000 steps, the value on your longevity is incremental, but psychologically I kind of like this 10,000 steps a day I think as well. So two things, and they’re mutually exclusive like everything in life.

Sergey Young: On one side, I’m disappointed about the development of the wearables. From our perspective, investing in the medtech space is extremely difficult because to approve a device to go through the enormous competitive intensities of companies like Apple, Huawei, Samsung, Garmin, it’s a big deal. While on the other side, there are so many things that we can do, like continuous glucose monitor, smartwatch, Whoop, and different other devices. This is on the consumer side. On the professional side, I love what is happening in this space. Like the ZIO patch, you just put it here, you can even swim in a swimming pool, take shower. It’s a continuous electrocardiogram for like seven days. This is just crazy.

Sergey Young: I’m wearing Apollo Neuro, which stimulates your nervous system through little vibrational sessions and help to increase your HRV, etc. What I’m particularly excited about, I couldn’t name the company, but they’re now working on a microneedling technology for continuous monitoring. Well, it’s Biolinq. I can probably share that in non-confidential way. They’re now working on seven different biomarkers that you can measure with one device. This is exciting. And I think they’re going to be on the market next year. I think in the future all of us will be able to cherry pick what are the particular indicators, usually the hormonal ones. I think it’s very important. And it’s more important for female health because of the larger and more complex hormonal context for females.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Interesting.

Sergey Young: I love it. I think in the future you’ll just go to the store, pick up this selection out of hundreds of different biomarkers that you want to measure or this choice will be made by your healthcare practitioner. You put your device anywhere on your skin and you’ll have continuous monitoring of different health indicators. And I’m very excited about this whole thing. Philosophically, I think what is important to understand, think about our childhood. Your measurement cycle, your feedback cycle to collect data was any number of weeks and month between visits to doctors. Like if you visit your doctor every six months, that’s your feedback loop. There is nothing you can change in this life if you receive feedback every six months.

Sergey Young: But now you can receive the feedback on the state of your health or particular area of concern every 15 minutes. You can have it even every second if you want. And I think what it helps is to change our lifestyle, to make our choices wiser and to give us the biggest piece of feedback. I’m not in the risk cohort for diabetes, but every three months I wear a CGM for 14 days and you couldn’t even imagine how many lifestyle and dietary choices have been driven by CGM feedback. We spend every summer in Italy, it’s a beautiful country. Every time I look at gelato and I know that if I take the Italian ice cream on empty stomach, I just envision this scream of my CGM indicator which goes through the roof, right? And I was a big fan of freshly squeezed orange juice and apparently it was just a sugar bomb for my blood. So this is a relatively simple but it’s still an important example that the beauty of wearables is that they actually help you and your doctors to establish the feedback loop and therefore, for all of us, it’s a huge opportunity to change.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right. Fabulous, fabulous. So I love that vision for where we’re heading and we’ll have access to almost customized biomarker data that we want. That’s such a cool vision. This company that you mentioned that’s going to have, I think, seven biomarkers available, can you mention what those are yet or we should just be keeping our eyes out?

Sergey Young: Unfortunately, it’s such a sensitive topic and they need to work with regulators. I don’t want to over promise and then people to be disappointed because FDA approval is important part of delivery of this to the market. So I know it sounds boring that I couldn’t share this now, but you’ll have a lot of positive surprises.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yep. We’ll keep our eyes open.

Sergey Young: Of course. Yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, exciting stuff to come.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s awesome. Any, just those of us seeking funding, any ideas where to go now for funding sources like grants? And I want to talk to you about what’s going on in the X-Prize world now, being so intimately involved. But those of us listening will be primarily clinicians in the functional medicine space, but there will be people who are conducting research as well and plenty of people who are just curious. What are your thoughts there?

Sergey Young: Yes, so a few thoughts. Well, first of all, it’s a very challenging environment. I mean, if you look at all the industries that you know from your own perspective, biotech has always been the longer term payout. If we start to develop a drug today, it can appear in the pharmacy in like twelve to fifteen years. So obviously, there is a huge sensitivity to the cost of capital and with a high Fed rate, Biotech suffered a lot. So we know the companies in the field, they’re on the right track, but they just lost like two-thirds of the market value simply because of the sensitivity to the high interest rate. So first of all, I just need to state that it’s just not as easy as it was pre-COVID or during the COVID time. That’s first thought.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.

Sergey Young: A second thought, as always, there’s just a lot of opportunities. And I’m so happy that you asked about what we call from investment perspective non-dilutive funding. The funding when you don’t need to share the piece of equities or any economic outcome of your research and your work. And therefore, every time someone from a scientific background or technological background comes to us and say, well, do you mind to invest? We’re like, of course we’ll consider it. But did you guys consider non-dilutive funding, grants, et cetera? And again, with the changes in the US, especially, it just became so difficult. And I have so many friends all around the US in the best universities, they basically had to revisit their grant program and their research program significantly.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.

Sergey Young: But at the end of the day, if you think about the kind of risk-return ratio, going for grants, hiring a special person full-time and part-time, simply to work on a grant side, I think it’s super important.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.

Sergey Young: From my work, I’m on the board of American Federation for Aging Research, or AFAR. It’s the largest and the oldest aging resource organization. It’s been in existence for more than 40 years. If you look at the volumes of that we use for grants, it just increasing every year by five to ten percent So we have a lot of donors to channel this grant so reach out to AFAR. XPRIZE is another example and as you know, I’m on the board of XPRIZE. I was the one who put the first money and effort to lobby the fact that we can actually have pro bono, non-commercial competition for all the technologies and scientific discoveries in the world to reverse human aging.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Amazing

Sergey Young: And here we are, I think we launched it at the end of 2023. It’s a hundred and one million dollars that the winning team– and actually it’s always winning teams. We have 600 teams from 50 plus countries register for competition. It’s actually not too late to register now. The message to everyone in the scientific and entrepreneurial community go to XPRIZE.com to learn about the XPRIZE Healthspan. It’s not too late to register for this competition.

Sergey Young: What strikes me is out of 600 teams is that we have so many brilliant ideas and I’m pretty sure the final stage four competition is going to be by the end of 2030 and the winning teams would need to reverse the age of the participants in their statistical sample by ten to twenty biological years in 12 months with 75% of the effect of reduction of biological age staying in play for another 12 months. You and I know it’s not that easy. So I’m very excited about what XPRIZE can offer. It’s non-dilutive funding. It’s in fact, the teams which are going to be preselected for the next stage have at least $100,000 to continue research and participate in it.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.

Sergey Young: Reach out to XPrize.com or you can reach out to me and I’ll connect you with XPrize team. So I’m very excited about what is happening today in the US and in the world in terms of supporting the brilliant minds that we have in science, we have in technology, we have in entrepreneurship to move the needle and add 10, 15, 20 healthy and happy years to human life.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yep. That’s amazing, it’s just beautiful.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I’m just grateful that you’ve joined us. Any final words, anything that I missed asking you that you would like to add?

Sergey Young: Yes, look, I just want to reiterate about the most important day of your life every year. Remember that day of medical screening and about becoming the director of the orchestra of your own health. I think it’s very important. Otherwise, it’s always a pleasure. As you know, I’m big fan and support your work. I’m always using this as an example, as I showed you, this is your protocol highlighted, always in use, and a beautiful book.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Thank you.

Sergey Young: Stay healthy and happy.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Thanks so much, Sergey

Sergey Young is a longevity investor and visionary with a mission to extend healthy lifespans for at least one billion people and make longevity solutions more affordable and accessible worldwide. With over 20 years of investment expertise, he co-founded the BOLD Longevity Growth Fund in 2023, focusing on technologies that target the causes of aging and improve clinical efficiency and safety, reshaping medical practice and democratizing access to innovation.

He is the author of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller The Science and Technology of Growing Young and serves as an Innovation Board Member at XPRIZE, where he co-created the XPRIZE Healthspan global competition to reverse aging. Sergey also sits on the Board of Directors of the American Federation of Aging Research (AFAR).

Website: https://sergeyyoung.com/

Follow Sergey on Instagram: @sergeyyoung200

Sergey Young

Longevity Vision Fund

XPrize Foundation

Verge Genomics

Dr. Dale Bredesen

Peter Diamantis

BOLD Longevity Growth

GRAIL

Freenome

Fountain Life

Tony Robbins

Marc Benioff from Salesforce.com

Lygenesis

Insilico Medicine

Nir Barzilai

NFFM Podcast: Why Centenarians Are Defying Science: Secrets to Living 100+

American Federation for Aging Research

The TAME Trial – Targeting the Biology of Aging. Ushering a New Era of Interventions

Biolinq

Podcast: Sergey Young’s Technological Innovations for Longevity and Biological Age Reversal

Podcast: Why Functional Medicine Is the Future of Longevity

Podcast: Why Centenarians Are Defying Science: Secrets to Living 100+

DrKF Clinic: Patient consults with DrKF physicians including Younger You Concierge

Bio Age Lab Test

Bio Age Self Assessment Quiz

Younger You Practitioner Training Program

Younger You book

Better Broths and Healing Tonics book

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