Tina Woods on evidence-based practices, government policies on public health and why Singapore is a model for longevity initiatives.
Founders Longevity Forum Singapore is only a couple of months away! Poised to bring together global leaders in longevity science, the two-day event will focus on the latest research and applications in healthy aging. With the growing global focus on longevity, this gathering provides a dynamic platform to showcase innovations and ignite partnerships that advance the pursuit of extended healthspan and vitality, and will also highlight Singapore’s role as a hub for innovation in tackling aging-related challenges.
Tina Woods, Executive Director of the International Institute of Longevity, will be a key participant at the event. Known for her dedication to advancing global longevity strategies, Woods has been instrumental in fostering collaborations between researchers, technology developers and healthcare providers, and her expertise will add depth to discussions on how to create scalable, evidence-based solutions for aging populations worldwide.
The Roundtable of Longevity Clinics held in December will soon be publishing its second White Paper which will provide the framework for activities the Institute will be prioritising in 2025 and beyond (the first White Paper can be found here).
Longevity.Technology: Tina Woods’ presentation with Jacqueline Poh, Managing Director of the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), on Governments Leading the Way is set to be a Forum highlight. Ahead of February’s Forum, we sat down with Tina to get her thoughts on longevity clinics, the need for international standards and regulations and more.
Tina Woods on…
A coming together
It’s really important that we come together as an industry, especially as we’re seeing a huge amount of interest and investment in the global health and wellness sector, and longevity is a core part of that bigger pie, especially at a time when we need more rigor, best practice, and standards, guidelines and protocols to ensure that we’re operating as we need to. We need to ensure we’re delivering real value to people and not damaging them either, because there’s a lot of new entrants into the space, which may not be as robust in their approach as really is needed.
It’s like every industry cycle – there’s a point where the early innovators need to start getting together in a room and thrashing out standards so they can all compete on the on the same baseline of rules. Longevity is a very much an international industry, and what’s great to see is that there’s a huge interest in collaboration. We need to bring that science and technology of longevity into the mainstream debate, both with government, investors and, of course, the general public. There’s room for everybody, and there’s plenty of room to grow.
Longevity clinics and beyond
Longevity clinics have a key role in the wider adoption of longevity, but we need more evidence. Many interventions that people are buying have very little evidence behind them, and we’ve reached a point where we’ve just got to make sure that we’re keeping people safe; some of the really early adopters, real biohackers, may actually be damaging their health with some of the stuff that they’re doing. Many of the really good clinics are starting to see those patients who are doing too much. There have been some interesting articles recently about de-prescribing, and these are all the sorts of things that need to be looked at collectively to ensure the best possible health and value for money for people. There’s so much more research that needs to be done in some of these new areas and what we call the next frontier of longevity, which is really about bringing what drives human healthspan resilience and flourishing.
I think the big vision of the future is an open science approach to longevity. There are a lot of big groups out there already looking at this, like Hevolution, M42, and public research studies like Our Future Health in the UK, the largest health study in the world. UK Biobank is still considered the gold standard, but we need much more; we need to open out those data sets, we need much more information around our behavior and what we do in our daily lives. Wearables and all the different sorts of technologies in our homes like sensors are collecting data that will open up a much greater understanding of what’s really driving our health and how, as individuals, we’re affected by external exposures and stressors in our life. This is what I call the exposome and these stressors are starting to be recognized as massively impacting our biology. But there’s only so much an individual agency can do with those other factors, and this is where governments have to intervene to create those healthier environments for human flourishing.
Worldwide longevity
Abu Dhabi is an example of the creation of a whole approach to health that’s not encumbered by the sorts of issues I call the westernized model of sick care, where we’ve got legacy systems, a way of doing things and a lot of entrenched interests and perverse incentives that are locking down progress. Examples of what we’re seeing in Abu Dhabi and elsewhere will hopefully inject a little bit of FOMO – the fear of missing out – because they’re steamrolling ahead and looking at this from a much more preventative health perspective. From a health and economic perspective, it makes a lot more sense to treat disease before it starts happening rather than wait too late, as we often do in the westernized model. It really it is in all of our interests around the world to move upstream into health prevention, and this is where the science and technology of longevity has so much to offer. And this is the big opportunity to get that into public health, government, and on the government agenda. And this is, again, where regulation and policy are so crucial.
Singapore is already often cited as the model to look at. They were the very first to recognise the impact of the aging demographic on their society and more than that, they’ve started to actually address it with policy. And they’ve had the advantage of being able to make decisions very, very quickly – they’ve been much more agile, much more fast-footed in all of this and now they’re seeing the results. Singapore is a model for the rest of the world to emulate.
