The Cures Within Us (Hanadie Yousef — Juvena Therapeutics)

Dr. Hanadie Yousef is a scientist, aging biology expert and the co-founder and CEO of Juvena Therapeutics, a Palo Alto-based biopharma startup developing protein-based therapeutics to promote tissue regeneration and increase healthspan to prevent, reverse, and cure degenerative diseases.  Dr. Yousef joins host Dr. Chris Patil to discuss Juvena’s premise, their use of a machine learning platform to identify proteins that have therapeutic potential, and what most excites her about turning signaling proteins into therapeutics. She answers questions about handling potential challenges within Juvena’s approach, their strategy for bringing drugs to market, and the first aging indication that they are targeting - muscular rejuvenation. Dr. Yousef outlines Juvena’s plans for a clinical study in patients with Myotonic Dystrophy Type 1 by 2023, and shares what’s coming down the pipeline next for her team. You’ll also hear about Dr. Yousef’s transition from academic science to becoming an entrepreneur, her involvement with the On Deck initiative, which seeks to increase the number of scientists, researchers, and inventors in the healthspan and longevity field, and why it’s so worthwhile to invest in anti-aging science. The interview concludes with Dr. Yousef’s advice for potential new founders in the biotech industry. She also shares the areas of longevity science that she is most fascinated by, and offers her thoughts on how the field of aging pharma will evolve over the next five to ten years. Episode Highlights: Tissues deteriorate as we get older and our ability to heal slows down - this leads to a wide variety of age-related diseases https://www.juvenatherapeutics.com/ (Juvena Therapeutics) sets out to find regenerative cures for those diseases During the aging process, critical regenerative protein signaling pathways that are important for instructing cells and tissues within our bodies start to change They start becoming over-expressed or under-expressed There is a change and loss of healthy crosstal