Our mission is to translate critical scientific advancements in aging research into accessible health products and technologies.

Working directly with the world’s leading scientists, clinicians, and institutions, we develop clinically validated solutions that address some of the most significant needs in healthcare.

As an interdisciplinary group, we leverage a multi-factor approach to address the multi-factor problem of aging.

Why Now?

Why now? Because we believe that scientific advancements in the field of aging research are leading to compelling new developments that will fundamentally redefine every aspect of how we think about healthcare.

Landmark scientific discoveries in the past 20 years — from the field’s first Nobel prize to the identification of the hallmarks of aging and the early indications of the ability to reverse aging — offer a path to novel, proactive health solutions.

We founded Elysium because we believe everyone should have the benefit of direct access to this compelling research. Working in partnership with the world’s leading scientists and research institutions, Elysium is creating a new category in the health industry by translating advances in science into effective products we can easily incorporate into everyday life.

We believe this is an entirely new approach to health and wellness.

Science, Our Core Value

A fully-loaded product pipeline in various stages of clinical development, Nobel Prize-winning advisors, partnerships with Oxford and Yale — and much more. At the heart of each one of our initiatives is a commitment to scientific rigor and open collaboration. This foundation enables Elysium to establish a fundamentally new approach to scientific discovery and support our customers in their pursuit of lifelong health and wellness. 

 

How It Started

It started with baker’s yeast, or saccharomyces cerevisiae. Elysium co-founder and chief scientist Dr. Leonard Guarente had just finished his Ph.D. at Harvard and was opening a research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was 1982, and his decision was ahead of the curve: Most aging studies at the time used comparative biology to learn about the difference between old animals and young. Few scientists were trying to understand the genetic and molecular causes of aging.

So why did he start with yeast? Well, it turns out we share the same ancestor as yeast dating back about a billion years, and believe it or not, many really important genes (or very similar ones) found in yeast are also found in other organisms, including humans. They are “conserved” in evolutionary terms, which means they have universal functions in many or all species.

At Elysium Dr. Guarente works with his co-founders, Eric Marcotulli and Dan Alminana, and the Scientific Advisory Board, to aggressively pursue a research agenda focused on translating scientific findings into products people can access in the near term.

Elysium’s co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Leonard Guarente, is the director of the Paul F. Glenn for Biology of Aging Research at MIT.

Dr. Guarente found a really important gene called SIR2. It took him and his postdocs eight years. 

In 1999, Dr. Guarente’s lab found that if they activated the SIR2 gene, yeast would live longer. Soon after this discovery, they found that SIR2 required a molecule called NAD+, which is found in all living cells, to function. Without NAD+, SIR2 did nothing.

In the years that followed it became clear how important this work was. There are SIR2-related genes that encode proteins called sirtuins in all organisms. Humans, it turns out, have seven of them. They’re found in different parts of the cell and they all do slightly different things, but they all require NAD+ and all are essential to human health.

“Sirtuins are kind of like an orchestra working together to produce a symphony, but each piece, each section, has its own role,” Guarente says. “Together you get a great unified outcome.” At the time of Dr. Guarente’s original discovery there were a few hundred scientific papers on sirtuins. Now there are more than 12,000.

These discoveries about the role of sirtuins and NAD+ are the foundation for Basis.

At Elysium Dr. Guarente works with his co-founders, Eric Marcotulli and Dan Alminana, and the Scientific Advisory Board, to aggressively pursue a research agenda focused on translating scientific findings into products people can access in the near term.