He Weiwu Shares Consensus from Human Longevity SAB Meeting: AI Moves Medicine Toward 'Understanding Life'
He Weiwu, global chairman and CEO of Human Longevity, recently shared key takeaways from the company's Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) annual meeting held in San Diego. The meeting brought together leading scientists including Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, and Eric Verdin, president and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, for cross-disciplinary discussions on future medicine, genomic data and longevity medicine.
According to He, the scientists generally agreed that medicine is entering the 'InformNet' era, centered on a network of life information. Life is essentially a complex information network: aging can be understood as the gradual loss and distortion of life information, while disease can be viewed as abnormalities in that network. The emerging framework for future medicine spans genome, deep phenotyping, continuous data, AI integration, risk prediction, personalized intervention, clinical outcomes and continuous learning.
On genomic data, the discussion proposed a direction of 'sequence once, store long-term, and reinterpret continuously.' DNA itself does not change over time, but human understanding of DNA evolves, and future research and AI models may offer new interpretations for variants that are currently not well understood. Hinton emphasized that AI must directly process raw multimodal information, because converting MRI, ECG, voice, gait and other data into language before feeding it to AI may lose information. Scientist Rhoda Au's phrase 'Digital is the new blood' also underscored the importance of preserving raw digital health data over the long term.
Regarding longevity medicine, Eric Verdin stressed the importance of 'scientific longevity' and cautioned that results from animal experiments cannot be directly equated with safety and effectiveness in humans. The meeting also touched on partial reprogramming research exploring a shift from 'slowing aging' to 'reversing aging,' but noted that such research remains at an early stage. Immune modulation was also highlighted as a promising direction for future longevity medicine.
