In 2017, British billionaire investor Jim Mellon invested in one of Zhavoronkov’s companies, Insilico Medicine, a big-data analytics firm applying deep learning techniques to drug discovery and ageing research.

Deep Longevity is a spin-out from Insilico.

AI drug firm Insilico could boost Hong Kong drug discovery sector. Here’s how

First, a little clarity on the types of ageing. When we celebrate our birthday, we are marking our chronological age - how many years we’ve been alive. But we don’t all age at the same rate.

Factors such as stress, sleep and diet affect how our organs cope with daily life, which means that our biological age could be quite different from our chronological age.

This is where “ageing clocks” come in. They calculate the wear and tear on your organs and predict how many healthy years you have left.

The first such clock was developed in 2013 by Steve Horvath and it’s still one of the best-known today. The Horvath clock estimates the age of almost every organ in the body using data from 51 body tissues and cells.

Since then there have been plenty of ageing clocks. Most of them estimate a person’s biological age.

But a new one -Zhavoronkov claims it is the first of its kind – aims to determine a person’s psychological age, and in turn boost mental health.

FuturSelf, developed by Deep Longevity, is a free online application in which users take a 10-minute survey that determines their psychological age – whether they are psychologically younger or older than their actual age.

“This is a great clock to introduce longevity mindfulness,” Zhavoronkov says. “It’s the easiest clock to change and the easiest clock to experiment with. Basically, what you are doing is identifying those wrinkles in your psychology.”

The app asks you to rate yourself on a sliding scale on topics including “I know what I want out of life”, “How much can I rely on my friends for help if I have a serious problem?”, “I like most parts of my personality”, “Society isn’t improving for people like me” and “I can do just about anything I set my mind to”.

A report with insights aimed at improving your long-term mental health and well-being is sent to your email afterwards, with an option to enrol in a free guidance programme.

This reporter enjoyed the test, not only because it was quick and easy, but because her reported age was 14 years younger than her chronological age. Who doesn’t want to shave off a decade? But there was more good news from Zhavoronkov.

“We have a paper showing that people who are younger psychologically live longer as well. So it’s a strong predictor of how long you will live, because you have a purpose in life,” he says.

If your results show that you are significantly older than your chronological age, you can act on the suggestions to improve this.

Broadly speaking, Zhavoronkov says younger people are more creative, more imaginative, take more risks and have broader horizons even though they may feel lonely, whereas older people tend to be happier.

“We get happier as we age, everything else gets worse. It makes us more content with our imminent decline and death,” he says.

He hopes that FuturSelf will direct attention towards the value of AI for psychoanalysis and sees a huge potential market in mainland China.

“In China there should be a boom in that area because their psychological counselling is not well developed. They just went through dramatic hardships [due to the pandemic] and probably got psychologically older – if your optimism goes down, you get older,” he says.

Professor Vadim Gladyshev, a biogerontology expert at Harvard Medical School, says the FuturSelf app broadens how we view ageing and the transitions through life stages and emotional states.

“[It] offers an interesting perspective on psychological age, future well-being and risk of depression, and demonstrates a novel application of machine-learning approaches to the issues of psychological health,” Gladyshev says.

No kids by choice for longevity-obsessed Alex Zhavoronkov

Zhavoronkov is so focused on researching and better understanding healthy productive longevity that he’s decided not to reproduce.

“I don’t want to have a family. I don’t want anything that will impede my progress. My company – and everything I do in life – is focused on this,” he says.

Born in Latvia, Zhavoronkov took two bachelor’s degrees at Queen’s University in Canada at the same time – a bachelor of science in computer science and a bachelor of commerce – followed by a master’s in biotechnology at Johns Hopkins University in the US and a PhD in physics at Moscow State University in Russia.

“I made quite a bit of money in my early 20s in semiconductors, the same semiconductors used in high-performance computing that are now used in deep learning,” Zhavoronkov says.

Cognitive behavioural therapy, a deceptively simple mental health tool

In 2014, he founded Insilico Medicine, an AI-powered drug discovery and development company, and became dedicated to what he sees as his life’s work: understanding healthy, productive longevity.

He pioneered the applications of deep-learning technologies for prediction of human biological age using multiple data types.

In 2018, he moved his company and the team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in the US state of Maryland, to the Hong Kong Science Park. The company has since grown to a staff of 200 in nine countries, with locations including New York, Taipei, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi.

Why your biological age may hold the key to reversing ageing