Impressions of the Biotechnet Meet-Up 2025: Conference Report Verified listing

Biotechnet held its third annual Meet-Up on January 28, 2025 on the topic Aging and Biotech. We were very fortunate to host the event at Google's Healthcare and Life Sciences Community in Zürich.

It was a full house with about 100 participants in attendance, half of which came from academia and the other half from the biotech, biopharma, digital, IP, and consultation industries.

Here is a summary of the presentations and panel discussion.

Google Healthcare and Life Sciences Community - Hemand Anand and Janaina Poeta Frey

• The Google Healthcare and Life Sciences Initiative serves Customers, Caregivers and Communities.
• Innovations stem from the Alphabet group of companies and include technologies like Alphafold and Gemini.
• The community brings stakeholders together to learn from each other. Interactions include conferences, business and technical sessions.
• It's free to join - contact Hemand or Janaina.
• Join the Community Kickoff event on March 6, 2025

Biotechnet and Its Platforms - Laura Suter-Dick, President, Biotechnet

• Biotechnet is an association of universities of applied sciences, research and academic organizations active in biotechnology.
• Our full members include FHNW, ZHAW, HES-SO and CSEM, with affiliated and group members at USI, Uni Bern, Uni Zürich, HEPIA, and BCC.
• Our members work together in thematic platforms: Antibiotics, Biocatalysis, Biomanufacturing, Bioresources, Data Science, In Vitro Diagnostics, Tissue Engineering, and Stem Cells. These platforms organize specialized scientific conferences where academia and industry meet, aiming to foster applied research collaborations.
• Once a year, all platforms get together for our Meet-Up, where we select a topic of interest to our network. This year we are focusing on aging, with invited talks from big pharma, start-ups and academia. We hope participants here today will learn new things and discover opportunities for collaboration with each other.

Diseases of aging and regenerative medicine (DARM) - Ina Kramer, Director, Novartis

• Novatis's approach to aging research is understanding and targeting underlying molecular mechanisms that drive age related diseases.
• Current research areas include mitochondrial health, DNA damage and repair, and ECM homeostasis.
• Novartis is applying this knowledge to the following disease areas: neurological diseases; cardiovascular and metabolism; and immunology.

Live longer, age better - Aksana Labokha, CEO, Centenara

• One in eight people will be over 65 by the year 2030; 80% of older Americans are living with a chronic condition and over 50% are living with at least two. Our lifespan is increasing but our healthspan is not.
• Centenara is a clinical stage biotech company with a hub-and-spoke model that develops regenerative medicine therapies for age-related disorders. We focus on addressing the root causes of decline in physical and mental fitness, as well as sensory capabilities.
• Our pipeline includes the following companies and products:
  1. Endogena's therapeutics for vision disorders, including retinitis pigmentosa and dry macular degeneration
  2. Centenara's senescense and teloremere-based therapeutics for breast cancer, pulmonary, cardiac and kidney fibroses
  3. Rejuvinate Biomed's therapeutic for sarcopenia (muscle degeneration)
  4. Boost Neuroscience's vascular therapeutics for neurodegenerative and cognitive disorders
• Centenara Labs' diversified portfolio, strong regulatory support, innovative approach, and pipeline progress position the company for future growth and success in addressing unmet age-related medical needs.

Why some organs age faster than others - Deborah Stroka, Group Leader, Systems Biomedicine of Cellular Development and Signaling in Health and Disease, University of Bern

• Liver cells have the capacity to regenerate.
• Mouse liver is an ideal organ to study cell regeneration and DNA replication. This is done by performing a partial hepatectomy and observing how quiescent adult hepatocytes synchronously re-enter the cell cycle. EdU (thymidine analog) and HU (ribonucleotide reductase inhibitor) are used to label the DNA found in hepatocyte cells, to understand the firing of DNA replication.
• In young mice, origin firing happens as expected, leading to the liver's ability to heal or regenerate itself. In older mice, hepatocyte proliferation is impaired, limiting the liver's regenerative capacity. This is due to reduced firing of DNA replication as a result of replication stress / DNA damage.
• The ATR kinase, which helps ensure genome integrity, sometimes prevents origin firing. Thus, inhibiting ATR is one approach to enhance the efficiency of origin firing and DNA replication in liver cells of aged mice.
• We are investigating a combination of agents to suppress the effects of stress responses, and how to induce repair of cryptic DNA damage, before stimulating liver regeneration.
• We are also interested in the revance of these findings to other organs, including implications for premature aging and aging-associated neurodegeneration.

Immunosenescence: When our immune system gets old - Birgit Weinberger, Group Leader, Immune Senesence and Vaccination, Institute for Biomedical Aging Research, Universität Innsbruck

• Changes to our immune system occur when we are older. Defects in cells of innate immunity include induced migration and phagocytosis, altered cytokine production, and reduced antigen processing and presentation. Changes to the immune response include production of fewer naïve T cells, more effector T cells, altered cytokine production, and functional defects in immune cells. This results in less naïve B cells, as well as defects in isotype switch and somatic hypermutation.
• It's important to understand how the immune responses changes with age, because the incidence, morbidity and mortality of infectious disease increases significantly with age. Infectious dieases not only cause hospitalization and deaths, they can also lead to cardiovascular events after infection, increased risk of dementia, decline of general health, and loss of autonomy.
• Vaccination is an important intervention in preventing infectious disease; however many vaccines are less immunogenic in older adults. This is why it's important to improve the design of vaccines for older adults, and to test vaccines targeting older adults in this population, not in younger subjects. Vaccines can also prevent comorbidities or complications beyond infectious disease.
• One infectious disease that is common in older adults is the Varicella Zoster Virus. Some people were vaccinated against the disease as children and others were not. If you were not vaccinated as a child, the virus you contracted remains in your sensory nerve cells and can lead to a symptomatic reactivation of the Zoster Virus in later years, characterized by painful plaques on the skin. Adult vaccination against Herpes zoster boosters the existing Varicella Zoster Virus immune response and restores immunological control.

Panel Discussion

• Panelists agreed that aging is not a disease. Even if we wanted to define aging as a disease for regulatory purposes, it would be difficult to provide the right biomarkers and endpoints that are needed for drug approval, because there are so many aspects to aging, and many approaches to address it.
• That being said, there are underlying cellular mechanisms of aging, or hallmarks of aging, that lead to increased prevalence of chronic diseases once we are over 65. Understanding and targeting these mechanisms could lead to advances across many disease ares.
• Panelists agreed that one challenge we face is developing representative cell models of aging. Current cell and tissue models are mostly based on induced pluripotent stem cells, which are by nature in an infant state. Making models based on older cells from patients could be one avenue toward clinically relevant and predictive in vitro models. Access to patient samples from hospitals will also be critical for the identification of relevant biomarkers.
• There was a divergence of opinion in terms of how far we should go in trying to eliminate senescent cells. One panelist felt that the overall complexity of cell and immune interactions should be considered. While eliminating senescent cells may at first seem desirable, it might lead to an inbalance or pertubation of the overall system. Same thing for activating endogenous stem cells. Other panelists supported the approach of investigating the effects of DNA damage during replication and targeting these mechanisms as a way to reduce the hallmarks of cellular aging.
• Finally, one panelist mentioned that biotech is only one angle in addressing aging, and that there may be more important interventions in the areas of sociology, psychology, mobility and nutrition that could play a greater role.
• When asked how academia can support biopharma and biotech companies working on aging, the panelists agreed that continuing to elucidate the mechanisms of aging, and investigating disease targets, are among the most important areas to focus on. Establishing research institutes focused on aging is a good idea considering the aging population, and making sure the topic is included in life science degree programs is also important. Holding events like the Biotechnet Meet-Up facilitates the sharing of information between different types of actors (big pharma, start-ups, academia, different sectors like biotech and digital tech, etc).

Intellectual property landscape: Biotech and aging - Christian Moser Nikles, Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI)

• A patent search using the keyword aging, as well as a few other keywords, returned a primary field of application in medicine, but with many other fields present, including, somewhat surprisingly, electronics and computer engineering. This is because devices age too!
• The search was refined to target the overlap between biotech and aging, returning about 2800 active patent families. The primary field of application changed from medical to biochemistry, with China and USA as clear leaders under these parameters.
• A deeper dive was then done to filter aging by patent classifications defining the main fields of application: pharma, food, biotech, cosmetics, diagnostics. Interestingly, Nestle leads the Aging and Pharma group in the number of patents, despite being known as a food company. Nestle is also the leader in the Aging and Food classification. L'Oreal leads the aging and cosmetics classification. The Chinese Academy of Sciences leads the Aging and Diagnostics classification.
• The IPI is available to support academics and companies in defining relevant patent searches and setting up automatic alerts. IPI also provides advice to start-up companies about protecting and managing IP. Finally, patents is not all there is to IP. Trademarks, trade secrets and more are also valuable tools and IPI is happy to advise on those too.