David Dodick on the evolving landscape of preventive healthcare and growing investment opportunities in proactive healthcare.
The Founders Longevity Forum Singapore is gearing up to be a landmark event next month, uniting leading minds from science, medicine and investment to explore transformative solutions for healthy aging. Organized by Founders Forum, the Academy for Healthy Longevity at the National University of Singapore, and Longevity.Technology, this two-day gathering aims to accelerate progress in longevity research, foster collaborations and highlight innovation in the Asia-Pacific region – positioning Singapore as a global hub for aging science and healthspan advancements.
Dr David Dodick, Chief Science and Medical Officer at Atria, is among the distinguished speakers set to take the stage. With a career dedicated to advancing preventive neurology, Dr Dodick has championed a proactive approach to healthcare, emphasizing the integration of data-driven precision medicine to optimize cognitive and overall health. Under his leadership, Atria’s multidisciplinary team is pioneering strategies that promise to reshape how aging and brain health are managed.
Longevity.Technology: As well as presenting an Introduction to the Longevity Universe, Dodick will be discussing viewpoints around The Use of Gerodiagnostics with Jeremy Lim (CEO, AMILI) and Vishal Harnal (Managing Partner, 500 Global). In anticipation of next month’s forum, we spoke with Dr Dodick about the shift from reactive to proactive care, the importance of data sharing and collaboration in longevity science, and why cognitive health should be prioritized from an early age.
David Dodick on…
Investment opportunities in preventive healthcare
This is going to be a trillion dollar industry. In the US alone, we spend $4.3 trillion a year on healthcare, and the overwhelming majority of that goes to sick care. Can you imagine if an equal investment or a shift in that investment was put into preventive healthcare? Can you imagine what that would mean for the health of a population? So I think the appetite has never been greater because of all of the noise. It’s just in the ether right now as people are thinking about what they can do to live a healthier, longer life. The environment is ripe for this right now. There’s so much investment already happening in this field and so many investors and so much venture money looking to get into this field because they see what’s on the horizon.
Of course investors are going to be at a meeting like Founders Longevity Forum Singapore because this is where the science is happening and this is where they will begin to understand and be able to identify what therapies and what groups look to be emerging and be on the cutting edge of this.
Inspiring the next generation of healthcare
Events like Founders Longevity Forum demonstrate that the future is here. I want everybody to be inspired, to get involved, and I want people to try to be integrating this to the extent that they can in their own practice. And I want people to be inspired by the fact that things that they never thought were possible, especially when it comes to brain health, are here today. We shouldn’t treat aging as a reason to expect an inevitable decline in cognitive function or that things like ‘senior moments’ are an inevitable consequence of aging. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Who doesn’t want a cognitive edge and who doesn’t want to boost their cognitive performance? I couldn’t be speaking in Singapore were not for my ability to perform cognitively. It’s the one thing that none of us want to lose as we age, but there are things that we can do today in 2025 to protect, preserve and enhance one’s cognitive ability and cognitive performance. And I would want people to start deploying that in their everyday practice and in their everyday life, both for them and their loved ones, as well as their patients.
Empowering a preventive approach
Healthcare and healthspan is recursive. In other words, what you look like at the age of 60 very much depends on how you looked after yourself and the care that you’ve gotten at the age of 50, which very much depends on what you did at the age of 40 and so on.
Our ultimate goal at Atria is to build a model of preventive healthcare, validate that model, and then share it with as many people to help as many people as humanly possible. Once that knowledge is shared with the community, with medical providers, and then the community, there will be increasing health literacy in the community and people will be empowered to take matters into their own hands and we’ll make the medical community more fluent in some of this new and emerging clinical science and data that we’re generating.
Sharing knowledge, sharing resources, sharing skills is going to be absolutely necessary. I see it happening and I particularly see it happening in this field of longevity medicine and longevity science.
