Our Story

The beginning of everything

SoLongevity was born in 2019 from the meeting of highly qualified researchers and clinicians. Its history actually begins long before and intersects that of the great revolutions in biomedicine from the 1980s to the present. Its roots go back to the first identification of HIV at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. It was in those same laboratories that Dr. Alberto Beretta, immunologist and founder of SoLongevity, lived through all the moments of the discovery of the virus and the subsequent development of effective diagnostic tests and drugs: an example of how basic research was able to transfer its knowledge to the clinic extremely quickly.

The story continues into the 2000s at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, where Alberto Beretta, as a physician and researcher in the field of immunology, began to observe the close similarities between the natural aging of the immune system and that caused by AIDS, and to study the effects of chronic latent inflammation, one of the main mechanisms of aging.

Two key events take place in those same years. First, the completion of the human genome map in 2003 thanks to the Human Genome Project, a Big Science program involving thousands of scientists worldwide. Everything has changed since then: the continued development of DNA sequencing technologies has revolutionized biomedicine, expanding in ways unimaginable just twenty years ago our ability to understand the complex mechanisms that regulate the human organism and its relationship to its environment.

The second major discovery concerns “longevity genes” by Leonard Pershing Guarente of MIT Boston. In the following decade, longevity research also explodes thanks to studies by David A. Sinclair of Harvard Medical School, and nine genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying aging are identified. Not only that, naturally occurring substances are identified that can interfere with some of these mechanisms and have a significant impact on longevity.

It is on the basis of all this knowledge that Alberto Beretta – together with a group of researchers from CNR, San Raffaele Hospital, Niguarda Hospital and Policlinico di Milano – has started a process of developing integrated anti-aging strategies and new nutraceutical formulations capable of slowing down cellular aging. And it is in this context of great scientific ferment that SoLongevity is founded, to transfer this knowledge to clinical reality, with the goal of increasing everyone’s chance of living long and healthy lives.

SoLongevity starts from the awareness that counteracting aging processes and reviving physiological capabilities require a multidisciplinary approach that also includes the cognitive aspect and is highly personalized. Collaboration with Prof. Valentina Bollati’s Laboratory of Environmental Epigenetics and Prof. Mario Clerici’s Laboratory of Immunology at the University of Milan has therefore enabled the development of highly sophisticated systems to measure the biological age of each individual and the level of immune senescence that accompanies aging, which often underlies susceptibility to infectious diseases.

This search for precision diagnostic methods and therapies for physiological rejuvenation and prevention of chronic noncommunicable diseases brought us to the attention of the National Innovation Center for Aging in Newcastle, U.K., with whom we have begun an extremely fruitful and productive collaboration to arrive at the development and selection of the most advanced and mature technologies for clinical use that can make a difference to people’s health.

‍Thanks to all these synergies, SoLongevity stands as a point of reference for all healthcare providers who want to enrich their clinical device with an offering that promotes the health and quality of life of their clients.