The Beginning
SoLongevity came into being in 2019 through the collaboration of highly qualified researchers and clinics. Its story, actually, starts many years earlier and is much influenced by the great biomedical revolution which began in the 1980s and continues to this day. It finds its roots at the discovery of the HIV virus at the Parisian Institut Pasteur. In those same laboratories Doctor Alberto Beretta, immunologist and founder of SoLongevity, lived through the very moments of the virus’s discovery and the resulting diagnostic tests and effective drugs. Herein we have an example of how basic research can be transferred to the clinic extremely rapidly.
The story continues to the beginning of the new millennium at the Ospedale San Raffaele in Milan when Alberto Beretta, as a doctor and immunology researcher, began to observe the close connections between the natural aging of the immune system with that caused by AIDS. He also began to study the effects of chronic low-grade inflammation, one of the main mechanisms of aging.
During those same years, two key events occured. First, the completion of the human genome mapping in 2003 thanks to the Human Genome Project, a Big Science program which involved thousands of scientists around the world. From that moment on, everything changed as the unceasing technological developments in DNA sequencing revolutionized biomedicine in unforeseenable ways. Only 20 years ago, our current ability to understand the complex processes that regulate human beings and their relationship with the Environment could not have been imagined.
The second big discovery was that of the “longevity genes” by Leonard Pershing Guarente from MIT in Boston. During the following decade, research on longevity exploded also thanks to studies by David A. Sinclair from the Harvard Medical School, and new genetic and molecular processes were identified which underlie aging. In addition to this, particular natural substances were identified which can interfere with some of these processes and have a significant impact on longevity.
It is with all this knowledge that Alberto Beretta, together with a group of CNR researchers, the San Raffaele Hospital, the Niguarda Hospital and the Policlinico, all of Milan, began developing a process of integrated anti-aging strategies and innovative nutraceutical formulations which are capable of slowing cellular aging. And so, into this scientific melting pot, SoLongevity has been founded to translate these understanding into a clinical practice with the goal to increase the chance for everyone of living healthier and longer.
