EPITERNA was founded in 2022 to help pets live longer and healthier lives. We have developed a unique high-throughput platform to evaluate supplements and assess their effect on healthy lifespan. This journey has been made possible by closely working with Prima Materia, whose aim is to help the most ambitious European entrepreneurs find technology solutions to society's most difficult problems.
We know that living longer and healthier is possible
Aging, and the decline in health and well-being that come with it, may seem inevitable. Yet in many species there are positive outliers: dogs, for example, live an average of just over 10 years, but longevity varies significantly between breeds and some dogs can live to be over 20.
Think about it – these lucky dogs get roughly twice as much life. And it’s not just more time: typically, they are remarkably unaffected by the chronic diseases that come with old age. They show that living longer and healthier lives is possible.
We know that aging is the major risk factor for multiple diseases affecting both us and our pets, including dementia, cancer, frailty, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. However, this deterioration with age is not linear, like a car wearing out. Rather, the aging process is malleable. Experiments have now demonstrated that we can slow down aging and extend healthy lifespan in animals in the laboratory.
We are building EPITERNA to translate these discoveries into longer, healthier and happier lives for companion dogs.
We are developing therapies to increase healthy lifespan
EPITERNA, which I co-founded with Kevin Perez, was born out of my 15 years as a scientist studying aging. This included work during my PhD studying aging in yeast, and later at the Salk Institute in California where I was one of the first to demonstrate how new therapeutic approaches like epigenetic reprogramming could extend the lifespan of mice. I then started my own laboratory at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland to continue studying how to slow down or reverse aging at the cellular and molecular level.
Today, we are putting the science into practice at EPITERNA. We are grateful to count on the guidance of our strategic advisors such as Dr. Matt Kaeberlein, Co-Director of The Dog Aging Project and CEO of Optispan; Dr. Richard Miller, Director of the Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at the University of Michigan and Principal Investigator at the Interventions Testing Program (ITP); and Dr. Johan Auwerx, Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Their combined knowledge and expertise is supporting our team of researchers and engineers, who have built an unprecedented screening platform that can test the effect of any supplement on the health and lifespan of multiple animals.
We develop supplements that check all the essential boxes:
- Safety: When it comes to helping pets stay healthy for longer, safety is key. We are identifying natural ingredients that can be safely combined.
- Effectiveness: Some natural molecule like Spermidine or Urolithin A have already been shown in the laboratory to slow down aging and extend lifespan. Similarly, we have already discovered other promising candidates in our platform.
- Accessibility: We want our supplements to be simple to use and accessible to anyone. Supplements are easier to manufacture, distribute, and use than more complex therapies, making them more affordable and accessible to anyone.
We focus on aging, not individual age-related diseases
We believe that addressing aging as the root cause of disease and physical decline, rather than treating specific age-related diseases, will have a more significant impact on pet health and lifespan. For this reason, instead of limiting ourselves to one mechanism or pathway involved in the aging process, our research platform is designed to identify any natural molecule that can safely extend lifespan and ‘healthspan’, the period of life spent free from disease.
EPITERNA’s innovative platform evaluates natural molecules that act at the molecular and cellular level in gold standard animal models of aging research. We know that many of the mechanisms controlling the aging process are conserved across different species, therefore we believe that the supplements that we discover might have higher chances of working in dogs. We have already assessed hundreds of molecules in smaller animals and more than a dozen in larger ones, validating promising candidates from the literature and identifying previously unknown leads.
After one year of work, we have developed the capacity to evaluate thousands of molecules per year in yeast, worms, flies, fish and mice. Now we are working to increase our throughput by an order of magnitude over the next two to three years by further leveraging automation and technology.
We’ll start a clinical trial for dogs in 2024
Our goal is to translate our research to impact the health of pets. EPITERNA is committed to scientific rigour, which means that all our products will undergo thorough clinical trials to guarantee their safety and efficacy. This presents challenges never faced before, so our team is designing clinical trials focused on longevity that can be run in a reasonable time at low cost.
We aim to start our first clinical trial for companion dogs in 2024 in Europe. I'm positive we can work collaboratively with regulatory agencies like the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to explore responsible ways to evolve our healthcare system towards preventative medicine.
Come join us
We believe we are building a European leader in one of the most important areas of Life Sciences, with the potential to revolutionise life and health for pets.
We are a growing team of ambitious scientists, engineers, veterinarians, and doctors passionate about developing life-extending supplements. If you share the same mission and passion, come and join us.