Sir Jonathan Symonds on healthspan, prevention and why data and analytical tools are now the most critical components in biology.
Hevolution Foundation recently released the second edition of its Global Healthspan Report, examining the state of healthspan science, technology, investments and policy globally. Building on two global surveys, investment data from Longevity.Technology, expert interviews and extensive research, the 2025 edition of the report examines the current state and future prospects of healthspan, highlighting key developments and actions the field can take as an ecosystem to bring healthspan to the next level.
Longevity.Technology: Among the key opinion leaders contributing to the Global Healthspan Report was Sir Jonathan Symonds CBE, Chair of the Board at pharma giant GSK. We caught up with him as part of the research for the report to explore Big Pharma’s perspective on healthspan and its associated elements.
When it comes to the mission to improve healthspan, Sir Jonathan sees a global shift towards preventive medicine as an essential component.
“We are focusing GSK on prevention,” he says. “In some ways it’s simple. If you think about infectious disease, of course you can prevent it, and that’s important. But when you think about things like dementia, neurodegeneration, cancer and cardiovascular disease, it gets much more complicated.”
Healthspan a ‘profoundly different’ process
While he believes society will continue to get better at treating diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease and the consequences of obesity, Sir Jonathan sees healthspan as a “discontinuity” for the field.
“Healthspan is a different approach, and it’s what we’ve been thinking deeply about,” he says. “To be able to prevent and early detect is a profoundly difficult process and with little linearity from here. We’re asking different questions, and we don’t have the data to do it.”
Of course, health systems are awash in data, but Sir Jonathan explains that the missing data is not about sick people – it’s about healthy people.
“If you’re going to intervene with these major diseases, you’re going to need to identify in a healthy person when the risk curve starts to change, either because of behavior, lifestyle or genetic or disease predisposition,” he says. “And we don’t have enough data on that.”
Despite the challenges, Sir Jonathan is excited by the prospect that recent advances in computing power and analytics have to start crunching the numbers and producing the data needed to answer fundamental questions about human biology.
“We have a voracious appetite for data,” he says. “In fact, we are building GSK around data and analytical tools. Biology is now the servant of data science. We’ve inverted things to a large degree.”
Everything comes back to data
According to Sir Jonathan, enough data probably exists already to predict genetic predispositions, but long-term, longitudinal data of phenotypic developments is lacking.
“Genetics explains a relatively limited proportion of disease, and when it comes to the epigenome and phenotypes, we have dramatically less data,” he explains. “So, we are now having to build the phenome alongside the genome in a way. We’re going back to basics.”
“We do have a chance of working it out, but it’s going to be personal – really personal,” he adds. “We are really building a completely new dataset, and things like biobanks will become increasingly invaluable to be able to piece together the life course of a disease and to identify where the intervention is.”
Sir Jonathan believes that the pharma sector is entering a period where companies will spend “50% of their time” on how to unite all the technologies and data.
“Do we have the capability, physically and intellectually, to be able to stitch this together, recognizing that it is around technology integration and data integration?” he asks. “How do you then build a single, decision-making screen that reliably integrates all of this so that the visual that you have is causal, not correlative? For me, the single most important missing link is how you create the visual interpretation of all of this data for choosing your next step, which may be an experiment or it may be another piece of an analysis. This is why everything comes back to data analytics and the right insights.”
When it comes countries that “get it” in terms of addressing healthspan, Sir Jonathan highlights Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Singapore.
“They’re investing significantly in data and technology, and in the case of Singapore, really rebuilding the system around individual health needs and an individual assessment, which moves the medical side from atomizing diseases to a more holistic approach,” he says. “I’ve also had really good conversations with the Chinese government. They have got a demographic problem that’s off the charts. And they’ve got to keep healthy people healthy if they want to maintain productive capacity.”
Social determinants are key
Of course, points out Sir Jonathan, understanding the biology of healthspan and developing new interventions is still only part of the solution.
“It counts for nothing if you’ve got a good intervention, but the health system is still overwhelmed with sick people, and it hasn’t got any bandwidth whatsoever to start assessing healthy people,” he says. “So the health system has got to want to engage in healthspan. And people like Andrew Scott and others have helped open up looking at the cost of ill health not as how much can we afford to put in the health system, but how much can we reallocate into the economy?”
Another area of healthspan that Sir Jonathan believes has yet to be properly recognized is the impact of social determinants on population health.
“Where you live, what your education is, what kind of work you do, what you eat, what you can afford to eat, that sort of thing,” he explains. “I think governments need to recognize regional and demographic disparity, and want to do something about it. Governments have looked at economically challenged parts of a country and tried to regenerate them. But I don’t think health has ever been on the map as part of an economic regeneration effort.”
Beyond traditional endpoints
Sir Jonathan feels these considerations could also one day be factored into the clinical outcomes of large scale clinical trials.
“What are the clinical outcomes we really want to know?” he asks. “Clinical endpoints are important, but they’re not enough. They don’t answer the question, because healthspan, and the gap between healthspan and lifespan, has all these social ingredients. They’re not just it’s not just pharmaceutical. If it was, that would be easy, if we could solve for that, but you can’t. It’s poverty, it’s housing, it’s diet, it’s education.”
Using obesity drugs as an example, Sir Jonathan says that the key endpoint was how much weight people lost.
“But beyond that – what were their social and economic consequences?” he asks. “Were they more socially engaged? Were the mental health consequences of obesity reduced, and did they get back into the workforce? Did they reduce the social benefits that they were on?”
“Because I think ultimately this has to be interpreted through increased economic and social participation. That’s what the consequence of solving healthspan is. Are you happier? Are you more socially engaged? Are you more economically productive? If the answer is no, then you follow the sunk cost to the health system. But if the answer is yes, society gets something back, there’s a value contributed. They are quite different endpoints.”
