Nov 30, 2025
3 min read
Dr. Karina Kern and Serena Kern - Libera lead groundbreaking research - and their human trials to death could crack the code to longer life
The pursuit of the Holy Grail of longevity has drained the careers of the brightest scientists and eroded the fortunes of some of the richest entrepreneurs. Now the search has reached a laboratory outside Cambridge, where the work of two young, talented sisters has attracted the attention, funding and expert support of billionaire investors, research philanthropists, the British government, leading scientists and NASA.
Carina Kern, 31, and Serena Kern-Libera, 37, are self-confessed workaholics who sometimes finish each other's sentences, and together they bring a boffin's vision and a corporate lawyer's knowledge to the race to extend human life.
Khan, the scientific mastermind of her operation, has a thinly veiled nerdiness and an important starting skill: being able to communicate what she's doing in an engaging way that anyone can understand. "I'm very ambitious," she says candidly. "And we hope to approve the first anti-aging drug."
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Two years ago, the sisters became attorneys working with the Magic Circle firm.
Based on the good information that emerged from Kern's work in the laboratory, investors, including the Australian-born billionaire Insta, signed on.Francis Cib's organization has done business equity.The new government agency, Inchinate UK, and the European Union provide funding.NASA selects Linkgevity as one of the world's innovations (and the only one from the UK) for its space program.
LinkGevity is a gem of six full-time employees, including siblings.But they include Bill Davis, their head of research and development, who is a former director of scientific operations at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, and their AI work is led by Nikodem Grzesiak, who was previously at CERN in Geneva.
Cohen reached out to some of the key figures at the heart of her work to explain what she sees as an important potential breakthrough. These include Joseph Bonventre, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the world's leading nephrologist, and Professor Justin Stebbing, a renowned oncologist and cell death expert. "They were skeptical at first because it was such a big claim we were making," she said. "But like any good scientist, you eventually follow them."data and I think that's what won them over."They gave her more than just their blessing;they joined LinkGevity's advisory board.
The search for an innovative development that will enable humans to survive, if not forever, at least for another decade or so, has led some of the greatest fortunes to amass vast sums of fortune.Nobel Laureate Team Sheet
Both gene editing and cell reprogramming hold promise.Drugs including rapamycin have been shown to extend the lives of mice, as have senolytic drugs that selectively eliminate senescent or "zombie" cells.Metformin, a diabetes drug, is hailed as delaying age-related diseases.
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Glucagon-like peptide-1 (Glp-1) levels in patients who are hypersensitive
At Linkegevity, the sisters are taking a different approach.One of the problems in dealing with aging, whether it's in the form of cardiovascular or kidney disease, she plans to identify "nodes" in our biology.Using what she calls the AI-EnabledPrint Theory, the “Blueprint Theory” focuses on Necrosis, the unwanted and unregulated cell death. “This particular Necrosis as the key node that leads to the greatest change,” she says.
When the cell membrane loses its integrity, it floods itself with calcium, which destroys the cells from the inside.To prevent this, it is possible to prevent diseases of several organs.
Experiments on mice have shown promising results
It was found that the cells can be protected if the two separate ways that the kashiva was entering the room can be blocked.The new drugs of the existing drugs were tested in human cells at the Labraham campus, where the business companies in Parkland in the south of Cambridge, where we are talking today.The results were promising, so the association asked an independent research institute to change the tests.Kerni said, "I think they thought we bred."your but you realize this isn't going to work?'And then he called me and said, 'It worked!'
Testing on mice is nearing completion and has shown very promising results, the sisters say.The plan is to start clinical trials in humans in the next few months.
The world of longevity science is full of exasperating researchers who see exciting results that don't translate to humans.Is there any reason to believe that LinkGumushity works differently against Necrotic?
The sisters are cautiously optimistic because necrosis is a fundamental and universal biological process in the animal kingdom.Many of the processes targeted by other longevity interventions are controlled by genes, and gene variants in species often result in animal outcomes that fail in humans.Necrosis does not control genes and therefore avoids this problem.
The first human trials are planned in the kidney
The data, Keren says, show the drug can block necrosis in all species, including complex human tissues, and is unlikely to cause compromises, such as the cancer risks that have killed other promising drug programs.
The first human trials are planned on the kidneys."The kidney is one of the most stressed organs, so it's often the first to fail," Kern says."That's why kidney disease is the ninth leading cause of death worldwide."Because necrosis is universal to all organs and tissues, the hope is that if a drug can prevent necrosis and related tissue atrophy in the kidney, it will work in other organs as well.
The plan is to test it in people prone to kidney disease to see if those who receive the drug show signs of preventing kidney degeneration and aging.
That's what made NASA take notice. Rapid degeneration and aging of tissues, especially of the kidneys, is a major issue that will need to be addressed if humans are interested in going on long journeys into space. NASA has provided mentorship, advice and artificial intelligence tools to help with the anti-aging project.
The sisters' journey into the competitive world of life sciences began far from Cambridge.They grew up in India.Kern was seven years old when she began asking the big questions that would lead her on a personal quest.
It was assumed that his grandmother was ill and was being sent home soon."Not only did he not come home, but my goodness, it was the worst spiral. I don't remember why you couldn't do anything for them.
"When I was a kid, I said, 'well, I'm getting old.'It was for me.I don't usually work 24/7, and I don't lose days."
We are not trying to be immortal
All this is very important, but she and Kern - Resera, who live next to each other in London, laugh a lot and laugh with each other.
Sisters don't try to make us immortal. "I think Serena and I both agree on the idea that neither of us is afraid of death," Cohen said.
Kern-Libera is pregnant, and I remember once interviewing a Harvard professor who said it wouldn't be unusual to live to be 150 in the future. Does Karen have any confidence that her soon-to-be-born grandson will live that long?“I won't put a specific number because I can't,” he says.will be."
There's no doubt that longevity science attracts some cynics.
"We are talking about eccentricity," he said in the first minute, the first membership is few, many are merely to do."A lot of one to do medical research."
As we chatted, others said that "snake oil" was being promoted by some in the warm scientific field.- So there is one more word.
She adds a word of caution about Ozempic and other GLP-1s and the optimistic chatter about longevity.This is due to degeneration, etc.”
The sisters are half Indian, half Swiss.Their grandfather, who was Swiss, went to India to start a company that supplied gems for Swiss watches.He and his Swiss wife settled in the Nilgiri Mountains in Tamil Nadu, South India.Their father started out as a deck boy, served in the Swiss merchant navy and is now a captain on oil and gas exploration ships.Their Indian mother is abstract.and is a landscape painter.
Serena achieved the highest GCSE result in India
As girls who attend the same Bannstenstenstenswo school that their father attended, and 60 children in the class.Keren-leren-said: "My parents were very happy that we just went to the local school", Keren, Littern, "Linera says we just said".They didn't want us to have another type of elite. It was a good school, but no frills. He wanted to make sure we had value for the team's success."
Tans pivots up when his sister went to a foreign school and got the highest GCSG score in India.He studied law at the Heanden School of Economics and was a teacher by killing here "" by Magnet ". He met his wife at law school. After a few years as a lawyer he moved to the bank of England where a group of workers went to the warehouse.
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Kern was a rebel at school."My mother always called my mother the director every now and then. Serenade, when she won the award. There was some kind of mischief with me."
“I was told it was career suicide.
She studied undergraduate and doctoral studies at University College London, and is a researcher in healthy aging. In the 1980s, Elegan became the focus of countless studies if genetics shut down the Nematode worm.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.cens.However, her Ph.D.There was a "huge gap in the interpretation of mankind."
There will be other skeptics on the long road ahead of testing and potential drug development (which they hope will take years, not decades).Those skeptics will naturally question their science.Some may even question their motives.After all, there are plenty of people hoping to make a fortune from the human desire to extend life.But I don't see dollar signs in their eyes when they show me charts of the positives on their laptops.When I ask if they hope this will end with a drug giant buying them up and turning them into billionaires, Kern-Lieber gently admonishes."I don't think we got into this because we want to be billionaires," she says.Her sister adds, "We're all in this because we want to do something good at the end of the day."
And unlike others who go into their fields, they don't talk about the horrors that many of us will experience living the good life in the 22D century.Even if their vaccine dreams come true and we build a water system in the bay, viruses will be waiting for us.Kern said, "It won't be the end of everything. But, he adds, the brutal truth and usage in the vulgar sense "are a lot of things that can kill us."
