Round up: Joint venture to advance Klotho-based therapies, and more
Agetech world explores the latest business and investment developments in the world of ageing and longevity.
Joint venture to advance Klotho-based therapies
Nevada-based Avant Technologies and Singapore-based biotech company Austrianova are entering into a joint venture and license agreement to establish Klothonova – a new company focused on pioneering cell-based therapies utilising encapsulated Klotho-producing cells.
Under the terms of the agreement, Klothonova will leverage Austrianova’s cell encapsulation technology to develop and commercialise treatments targeting Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, other age-related conditions and longevity promotion.
Austrianova will contribute its intellectual property and ‘know-how’ to the venture.
Avant will provide capital, along with additional resources, to support Klothonova’s formation and operations.
Klothonova will operate as a 50/50 joint venture, with ownership equally split between Avant and Austrianova.
The company will be focusing on developing innovative treatments through the over expression of the Klotho protein, encapsulated using Austrianova’s technology.
Austrianova’s CEO, Brian Salmons, said: “This joint venture with Avant Technologies allows us to combine our proprietary technologies with Avant’s resources to accelerate the development of Klotho-based therapies.
“We are excited about the potential to improve patient outcomes and promote healthier, longer lives.”
The parties say that Klothonova will prioritise the development of treatments for major indications, with each programme independently managed to ensure focused progress.
Biostate AI launches K-Dense Beta to accelerate biological discovery
Biostate AI has launched K-Dense Beta – a multi-agent AI research system that can compress research cycles from years to days, while eliminating hallucinations in generative AI models.
According to the company, in testing, K-Dense has made a scientific breakthrough in longevity research which will be published in a peer-reviewed journal this year.
The K-Dense system coordinates specialised agents that plan experiments, review literature, design analyses, execute code in secure sandboxes and generate publication-ready reports.
The system eliminates hallucinations by operating like a team of independent scientific reviewers, with agents cross-checking references against external databases, adding feedback loops to improve accuracy, and building full traceability and auditability of every decision and action.
“There is a crisis in science right now, where we have too much data and not enough resources to evaluate it,” said Ashwin Gopinath, co-founder and CTO of Biostate AI.
“We have created an AI scientist that can work 24/7, dramatically accelerating discovery while maintaining rigorous scientific standards.”
With integrated access to resources ranging from standard bioinformatics pipelines, tools like Google’s AlphaFold, curated databases and multiple small and large specialised Large Language Models (LLMs), K-Dense can also modularly connect to any tool available through Model Context Protocol (MCP), a universal protocol that allows AI systems to access and co-ordinate external software.
K-Dense’s capabilities were validated in collaboration with Professor David Sinclair, co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School.
Tasked with building a transcriptomic ageing clock, K-Dense analysed the ArchS4 dataset of more than 600,000 transcriptomic profiles, selecting 60,000 high-quality samples and strategically focusing on 5,000 genes from over 50,000 available.
The analysis revealed that different sets of RNA transcripts become important predictors at different points in life.
Genes useful in one stage were irrelevant in others, showing that ageing is not a uniform process but a sequence of biological programmes that each require their own predictive model.
“K-Dense enabled us to complete an entire research study in just a few weeks, work that typically requires months or years of expert analysis,” said professor David Sinclair at Harvard Medical School.
“It pointed us to markers and pathways that warrant deeper study and helped us build a unified AI model for predicting biological age.
“Importantly, it also provided a measure of how reliable those predictions are, which is critical for scientific applications and has not been available in prior AI approaches.”
The findings have been submitted for peer review and are available as a bioRxiv preprint.
Biostate AI is now validating K-Dense with design partners, including academic institutions, biotechnology startups and major pharmaceutical companies.
US$6.9M to launch AI-native decentralised science platform
Bio Protocol – a decentralised science (DeSci) platform building AI-native infrastructure for biotechnology – has raised US$6.9m.
The financing will support Bio Protocol’s expansion into a full-stack platform for AI-driven decentralised science, scientific funding and drug discovery.
The platform enables distributed groups of researchers, patients and cryptocurrency users to create and grow AI-driven research networks that automate scientific tasks and monetise biotech discoveries.
By integrating AI with blockchain features for co-ordination, funding and data integrity, the platform enables biotech research to move faster from hypothesis to commercial application.
Paul Kohlhaas, founder and CEO of Bio Protocol said: “Science today is locked in institutional black boxes, cut off from the very researchers who birth it and the communities primed to accelerate it.
“By unifying AI, biotech and crypto in a decentralised platform, researchers and citizen scientists everywhere can collaborate more efficiently and back promising biotech from its earliest stages, compressing drug development from decades to months.”
One of Bio Protocols first ‘BioAgents’ – a decentralised AI agent designed to accelerate and reduce the cost of scientific development while maintaining blockchain-verified knowledge flows. – is Aubrai.
Aubrai launched in late August 2025 in partnership with VitaDAO and leading longevity researcher Dr. Aubrey de Grey. Trained on Dr. de Grey’s lab data and community insights, Aubrai has generated more than US$900,000 in research funding.
Bio says it plans to expand the BioAgent framework globally to more researchers, creating networks of agents that surface hidden connections across biology faster than legacy labs.
Dr. Gilberto Lopes joins longevity company Immorta Bio
Longevity company Immorta Bio has announced the appointment of Gilberto de Lima Lopes Jr., to its strategic advisory board.
Dr. Lopes is globally recognised for leadership in lung cancer and immuno-oncology.
He was principal investigator of KEYNOTE-042, the trial that supported the 2019 FDA first-line approval of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in PD-L1–positive advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), broadening access to checkpoint inhibition for hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide since approval.
Immorta Bio’s lead program, SenoVax, is a senolytic immunotherapy designed to train the immune system to selectively eliminate senescent cells – aged, dysfunctional cells – that accumulate in tumours and their microenvironment, and which are associated with immune evasion and resistance to therapy.
According to the company, in preclinical studies, SenoVax has demonstrated anti-tumour activity across multiple solid tumour models, including lung, breast, glioma, and pancreatic cancers, and synergy with checkpoint inhibitors.
The company is working with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to advance SenoVax into a Phase I/IIa study in advanced NSCLC.
“Joining Immorta Bio is an exciting opportunity to extend the promise of immunotherapy beyond traditional cancer care into longevity and healthy aging,” said Dr. Gilberto Lopes.
“The concept behind SenoVax – targeting senescent cells to enhance anti-tumour immunity – builds on the foundation established by checkpoint inhibitors like pembrolizumab.
“I look forward to helping guide the translation of this innovative science to patients.”
