In vivo validation of safe and effective gene targets for cellular reprogramming therapies

Although UK life expectancies have increased, healthy life expectancies have not increased at the same rate. Consequently, although we are living longer, we are spending more time in poor health. Men and women born in England in 2018-2020 can expect to live to 79.4 and 83.1 years, respectively, but will spend the last 16.3 and 19.3 years, respectively, in 'not good' health. Poor health in later life can have a devastating effect on an individual's quality of life, personal wellbeing, and independence, while overall ageing of the population places further pressure on already overstretched health and social care services. The UK spent 7.8% of its GDP on health and care provision (2018/19); this is projected to rise to close to or above 10% of GDP by 2030/31\.

Based in the Milner Therapeutics Institute (Gurdon Institute), Shift is a biotech start-up on a mission to deliver the first drugs for safe cellular rejuvenation, enabling mitigation of chronic diseases in the sick and healthspan extension in the healthy. Situated at the leading-edge of biomedical science, Shift's proprietary Active Machine Learning platform enables us to untangle the cellular rejuvenation pathway and identify gene targets for safe rejuvenation.

With Smart funding, we will validate the safety and efficacy of the first identified novel set of rejuvenation genes in vivo for the first time, conducting aged mouse studies.

Our innovation directly supports the UK's healthcare mission to address the underlying biology of ageing highlighted within the UK Life Sciences Vision 2021 (HM Government, 2021). Our project is aligned with three priority areas of UK strength and opportunity highlighted in the UK Innovation Strategy 2021 (AI; Bioinformatics and genomics; and, Engineering Biology), and has the ambition to ultimately address 3 UN Sustainable Development Goals (3: Good Health and Well-being; 5: Gender Equality; and, 10: Reduced Inequalities).