How To Optimize Your Health For A Brighter Tomorrow

Chris Mirabile

Thank you. That was quite the intro. I feel like the episode is practically over.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

It was, but all of it was just so interesting and explained why you’re passionate about your company. I would love to learn more about your health journey with this brain tumor.

Chris Mirabile

Sure. This affected me at an early age. I was already interested in health, and I had been living a very healthy lifestyle since I was 12 years old. I picked up an issue of Men’s Health magazine, was inspired by it, and started exercising and eating a healthy diet. So it was that much more of a surprise to me to suddenly be in New York City on a school trip and wake up with blood all over my shirt because I had had a seizure and they separated my tongue. Being rushed to the emergency room and being told that you have a brain tumor on my left temporal lobe that was bumping up against the hippocampus and larger than a golf ball, it was that much more surprising because of how healthy I was already living. That experience was transformative in every way you can imagine, from inspiring me to be an entrepreneur and trying to chart my course to having a deeper value for life and an appreciation for even things as crazy as pain and frustration. I built an appreciation for that because I was alive to experience it. It was an amazing experience that I consider a gift when I look back on it. It also planted a seed for me, which has blossomed into what is essentially Novos today. But it took decades to get here. That seed was essentially an interest in long-term health, which most people don’t consider until maybe they’re much older, or maybe not at all in their lives, though your audience is considering it. But most people, especially teenagers, are only thinking about short-term health outcomes. They’re only thinking about whatever that specific goal is right now. Maybe it’s weight loss or muscle building or focusing better or building libido, or whatever it might be, thinking of those goals, but then not thinking of what the repercussions might be of whatever intervention you follow in 10, 20, 50 years from now. I have been thinking about that ever since the brain tumor. for a long time, and about ten years ago, I came across a scientific paper published in the journal Cell. It’s now considered a seminal paper called The Hallmarks of Aging. This paper, which I identified through a meta-analysis of hundreds of other scientific papers, identifies what’s known as the nine mechanisms of aging.

These are the cellular reasons why we get older, which can be defined as a mechanism of aging. It has to be something that, if you accelerate it, it’s going to accelerate aging. and it’s also found as a consequence of aging. Older animals across species, including humans, find that these mechanisms are accelerated or further degraded as you get older, and if you decelerate them, you can slow down the rate of aging. So there are nine of these. When I learned this, it gave me a new lens through which I could look at my health and my aging. So, that was the first AHA moment that I had in the area of longevity because, before that, I didn’t even think of the term longevity; I was just thinking of trying to be healthy for as long as I could. The second thing I gathered from this paper was that aging is possible to impact. It’s not something that this is. Aging itself is inevitable, at least at this point. But the rate at which you age and the risks that can come from the aging process are malleable and that you can impact. We can talk more about that, I’m sure. In this interview, we will, but those were two revelations that I had from this paper. then that’s when I started my journey. That eventually ended up becoming what is now Novus.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

What a wonderful story. You brought up a lot of great points. The teenager who is slamming down these nasty protein drinks that have a bunch of gross ingredients in them isn’t thinking about how this is going to impact my body. It happened to me. I was an assistant coach for a sport. I don’t want to call this person out too much. He was drinking just like a Monster drink at, like, 8 p.m. or it was one of those energy drinks, and I’m like, Why are you drinking that right now?” He’s like, “Well, it’s going to kill me someday, and my heart’s going to explode, but I just don’t care.” That’s like the anti-longevity aspect. You want to be like, What am I doing? What am I putting in my body? How is it going to affect me the next day? As a mother, I try to tell my kids that, but I also don’t want to be so strict that they go to college and they just explode. But then anyway, that’s a great point because when you were 12, you were already thinking about this. What a gift! Like you said, you turned this. a very scary seizure. As an ER doctor, when we see seizures, it’s a scary event that you turn into something beautiful. Why is longevity the most important aspect of our health, and why are we even talking about it?

Chris Mirabile

Longevity is incredibly important because, first and foremost, it is the number one risk factor for chronic illness. Those chronic illnesses include cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and then other things like sarcopenia, glaucoma, and so on. Even for something like lung cancer, people assume it’s cigarette smoke, but it’s not. It’s aging, and it’s by a significant margin. Don’t quote me on this, but it’s something like five times more culpable for the fact that lung cancer is aging compared to cigarette smoke. That in and of itself is reason enough to want to think about longevity and the process of aging. But it goes beyond that as well, because when you look at these mechanisms of aging and the things that decline or degrade over time that lead to this aging process and these chronic illnesses, if you’re looking through that lens and looking at optimization of each of these mechanisms, you’re going to improve your health today. This isn’t like some; buy this life insurance policy, and you won’t see it until your final days. That’s why you will see it in your final days. Of course. But more importantly, you’re going to be receiving the dividends today in your current life, and so you brought up this example of your assistant coach. 

The first thing that came to mind was when he said, like, or you said that he was taking it at 8 p.m., and he said that his heart might explode, but he wants to take it anyway. My first question was in my head: what exactly is wrong with his health in the first place? He feels the need to have stimulants at 8 p.m.; he’s most likely undernourished, not sleeping well, or maybe overly stressed. All of these things where he feels he needs to pick me up at 8 p.m. and, so that in and of itself is an issue. If you focus on longevity and these hallmarks of aging, you’re going to optimize your biology today, and you’re going to feel better today. I’m doing things approaching 40. I’ll be 40in a few days. that are exceeding what I was doing in my teens and 20s. I used to run track in high school, and I set a personal best for a mile, though. That wasn’t my competitive distance. But I set a personal best for a mile when I was in college. I’m very close to exceeding that now. At 40 years old, it’ll be at a low five-minute-mile pace. I’m doing that because I have optimized my cellular biology according to this perspective of longevity.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

You’re seven years old for your time.

Chris Mirabile

It’s the equivalent of a seven-year-old. When we talk more about, like, the idea of biological age and what it is, I can bring some clarity to that because I don’t think that I am 25 years old in every sense of the word. There’s some complexity to that. But important aspects of health are related to that younger year.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Yes, absolutely. I tell my patients that a lot. The last decade when I’ve dug in worked on my health, and did an integrative medicine fellowship. I feel better at 42 than I did when I was in my 20s. I had an autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s. Going back to my assistant coach. A couple of months after he posted how he was at the hospital and had some mystery illness,  these things catch up with you if you don’t correct your aging and those processes leading to inflammation and aging, and all of these things, it’s just that you’re going to have a diagnosis, unfortunately. That’s why we have to be proactive. That’s why everyone is listening to this peptide summit to learn more about how to optimize. Why exactly do we age? You’ve talked about aging from the standpoint of exercise, and,  you’re feeling better now. If you look at people, if they’re doing things to increase their age inappropriately, like smoking, drinking, or working a night shift, you can see it in their faces.  What are these 12 hallmarks of aging, and why exactly do we age?

Chris Mirabile

That’s a great point. When you see someone who smokes a pack a day over countless years and you look at a photograph of them, you can even take twins. Studies of twins who once smoked in one didn’t show that you can see that somebody accelerated their aging and sped it up. and there are others who you can see slow down there, aging, for example. We all know the 60-year-olds who look like they’re 75 or 80. And then we know that 60-year-old who looks like and behaves as if they’re 40, with all of their youthful energy and so on. That’s just a case-in-point example of slowing down the aging process versus accelerating it. As the researchers have found, anywhere between 80 and 90% of the aging process is based on lifestyle and environment, and only 10 to 20% is based on genetics, which is empowering. When people hear this, you can take it. in your hands, the aging process. Specifically, why do we age? As I mentioned, the hallmarks of aging elucidated what those biological and cellular processes were. Since then, those original authors, on the tenth anniversary, have republished that paper with an additional three hallmarks of aging. Now there are 12 known mechanisms of aging. I can go through it, but I don’t know how much time we have. I can give quick explanations for each of them. Or I could just read through what each of those are. What would you do?

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Maybe read through them and then pick your favorite? I do want to say, though, what you said about how only eight to 10% are genetic. that should empower people. But people like to use genetics as an excuse, though.  For all of you listening out there, you can’t do that. You can change.

Chris Mirabile

Even things like not all diseases, but many diseases, disease risks, and genes are activated or deactivated based on lifestyle choices. You might have a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, or cancer, but the lifestyle decisions you make are going to minimize or maximize the chances of those outcomes. The difference and reasons why we age. I’ll quickly go through these. One is mitochondrial dysfunction, or cellular senescence, which are zombie-like cells that accumulate in our body as we age and cause a loss of proteome stasis. This is protein upkeep within our body’s altered intercellular communication and genomic instability. This is DNA damage. This was once thought of as the primary reason why we age. This is where antioxidants, oxidative damage, and so on caught on, especially in the 80s and 90s and into the early 2000s. but it’s been since shown that this is just one of many causes of aging, and it’s not nearly as impactful as once thought. Epigenetic alterations. 

We can talk about the epigenome. That’s an exciting area that we can cover with telomere shortening. You mentioned my telomeres earlier. Telomeres are the protective end caps of chromosomes that contain our DNA. Every time there’s a cellular division, they get shorter. It’s correlated with aging. But it’s not a strong correlation. It’s about a 0.3 correlation. deregulated nutrient sensing. These are nutrients like IGF-1,  growth hormone, glucose, and so on. how our body deals with these nutrients. Stem cell exhaustion. We have fewer stem cells, or they’re less capable of creating perfect replicas of themselves as we age. Inflammation. This is this chronic inflammation that starts as a whisper when we’re in our 20s or early 30s, but then it grows in intensity and becomes lather and lather as we age. We can see this in different blood biomarkers, like CRP and the Interleukins and so on Disabled autophagy, and then finally dysbiosis, primarily based on gut microbiome dysbiosis. Are there any of these that you’d like to dig into?

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Let’s talk about cellular senescence and then epigenetics. I feel like those are good ones. They’re becoming more popular to discuss.

Chris Mirabile

First, it’s important to note that all of these are complex webs. They impact each other. If you have a favorable effect on one of them, you’re most likely going to have a favorable effect on all of the others. but what’s most important, from our perspective at Novos is to try to not through the secondary mechanism, but instead through a primary mechanism, address every one of these hallmarks. That’s how you’re going to have a significantly greater effect on the aging process. specifically cellular senescence, they’re oftentimes referred to as zombie cells. These are cells that fall apart, self-destruct, and are no longer capable of performing their role as cells. Normally through processes like autophagy, where the body will recycle these cells in the cellular components, or apoptosis, where the cell will commit suicide, so to speak, that’s what would ordinarily happen to cells in these cases. Senescent cells, for some reason, fly under the radar, and they don’t end up getting removed through apoptosis in autophagy. They continue to exist. The problem with them is not only that they are present and they’re not performing their function, which you can imagine if you have a lot of these present in tissue and then an organ, then that organ is not going to perform as well.

But perhaps even more important is that they secrete what’s known as a SASP, a Senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype of things like cytokines and inflammatory molecules that will then cause nearby cells to also become inflamed and then eventually potentially senescent as well. We see the process rising exponentially as we get older. It’s one of the reasons why our skin wrinkles. It’s one of the reasons why our arteries harden and get stiffer. So it’s it: researchers have invested lots of money, and there are a lot of biotech companies that focus exclusively on removing cellular, or senescent, cells. That process is called Senolytics. An analytic molecule can selectively target senescent cells without harming nearby healthy cells. The issue with Senolytics is that oftentimes they’re not that clean. There are unwanted casualties around those senescent cells in healthy cells. so you have to be careful with it, especially when companies are claiming to be Senolytics, where products are claiming to be Senolytics. The other thing I would say is that most companies that are claiming—perhaps all companies that are claiming—at least over the counter to be Senolytics are not Senolytics. and they’re probably not even researching them. We’ve done studies, for example, on our formula and found that, rather than the Senolytics property, it never scores. Our foundational product has a senostatic property. It’s able to not only prevent senescent cells from propagating or secreting their inflammatory molecules and causing other senescent cells to become senescent but also reduce the size of the senescent cells. I like to say that the senescent footprints and we were able to do so as significantly as the prescription gold standard longevity drug, Rapamycin. more than 50% reduction in the size of the senescent cells. I feel like that is a safer way to address cellular senescence because researchers have also found that if you remove all senescent cells in some animal models, for example, mice, it can hurt the health of the mice.

There’s a happy medium between the two. You want to remove senescent cells, but we don’t know exactly which ones. The do-no-harm approach for us is to prevent them from spreading and shrinking in size. The second thing you asked about was epigenetic alterations. I believe. The epigenome is important when it comes to the subject of longevity. It’s relevant also when we talk about the idea of biological age. The epigenome is a layer that sits on top of your genes. We’re all familiar at this point with the idea of DNA and genes. but most people aren’t yet familiar with the idea of the epigenome. An analogy I like to give is that if your genes are a piano in the actual keys on the piano, your epigenome is the music that’s being played on that piano. When you’re very young, your epigenome is perhaps playing something beautiful like Tchaikovsky. Then, as you age, certain keys are incorrectly pressed. Other keys are not pressed when they should be. The rhythm is off a little bit. It’s not perfectly timed anymore. So things start to fall apart until you’re very old; maybe it doesn’t even sound like Tchaikovsky anymore. So there are patterns to this. Certain genes turn on when they shouldn’t and turn off when they shouldn’t. For example, an anti-inflammatory gene might turn off when it shouldn’t as you get older, and then inflammation starts to run amok. So these patterns have been detected by scientists, and they’ve been able to build algorithms, which are these epigenetic, biological age clock algorithms where we can see at any given point in time, the better algorithm settings. Some of the earlier ones that aren’t as powerful don’t do this, but the newer ones can correlate your epigenome with morbidity risk or the chances of a chronic illness, mortality risk, as well as quality of life metrics like things like your gait speed, your mental reasoning, your memory, and so on. 

And so this is where the idea of biological age comes in, at least the most effective and accurate way to measure it. There are many other ways people measure biological age, but you always have to be skeptical of what they’re using to measure their biological age, because if it is not one of the most scientifically validated tests out there, looking at your epigenome, it’s probably just like a correlate of aging, something like, I could technically look at my mile speed and say that I am biologically 20 years old because I’m running faster than the average 20-year-old. But that’s not the full story about my biology. Whereas the epigenetic clocks are at least getting closer to that full story. Not perfect, but getting a lot closer because it’s measuring the epigenome. in your blood. Be cautious of salivary or buccal swab-based epigenetic tests, but at least in the blood, that is, methylation data from all of your cells across your body. It’s touching all of your organs. So that’s how you can get a good idea of how you’re aging overall. 

The epigenome is essentially turning genes on and off. Researchers have found a lot of promise in being able to coerce the epigenome to reflect a younger state. There have been studies where, in mice, for example, they’re able to take a specific organ like the liver and make an old liver young again, or even eyes and take an animal who has gone blind from age and essentially make them see again. This is the hope that we can then have this organ-specific approach for humans as well. Starting with blindness is most likely what researchers will begin testing and applying to different organs. Then the question becomes: can we do this on a full-body basis? which we don’t yet know if we can. If people tell you we can, they’re getting ahead of things.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Yes. I love all of that. It’s so great to know that we can go and change some of these hallmarks of aging and slow down aging. You have a website that is called slowmyage.com. Tell us, you do think we can truly slow down aging. We know that the research shows you can.

Chris Mirabile

100% without a doubt, we can slow down aging. Again,  we can see it in animal studies: we can accelerate aging with different lifestyles and different molecules. We can feed animals, and we can slow it down just as well. In humans, there’s no reason to believe that’s not the case. We see, just anecdotally in real-world settings, how people, again, with poor lifestyle habits like smoking cigarettes, drinking too much alcohol, and so on, can accelerate their aging. then those who are physically fit, eating a nutritious diet, and getting all of the micronutrients they need for proper health and functioning are slowing down the process and reducing the risk of disease, and they’re more physically and mentally capable as they age. So on my website, I keep track of the interventions I follow and then all of these different biometric outputs. For example, I have 16 different epigenetic clock outputs. As I mentioned, there are many different clocks, some better than others. So I’ve tested. not all, but close to all of the well-known ones out there. I’ve seen the variation between them. But overall, with a couple of outliers that have said that I’m much younger than the immune system clock said that, 17 years, 17.6 years younger than I am.

That’s an extreme outlier. Most of them are averaging about 14 years or so younger than I  am chronologically. And then I’ve also measured things like metabolomic clocks, which looked at more than 600 different biomarkers and then calculated my biological age based on those, real-world physiological markers like pulse wave velocity and VO2 max, resting heart rate, and so on. Even a facial age AI tool that we offer for free on the Novos website is called Face H. If you go to novuslabs.com and search for face age, you can find it, which is trained to determine how young you look and gives you skin health markers as well, like wrinkles, inflammation, and so on. then tips to improve all of these. Across all of these tests, if I average them out—the epigenetic tests, metabolomic real-world physiological ones, spatial age, and so on—it averages out to -14.4 years, which is like a square right square in the middle of what these epigenetic tests are also telling me. What do I take this to mean? I don’t think that I am 26 years old. I look older, so there are other aging processes taking place. What I take this to mean, though, is that I have the morbidity risk, the mortality risk, and also the cellular functioning or capabilities of somebody who is an average 25-year-old. I don’t think I’m aging in reverse, but I do think that I am maintaining a healthy body that is equivalent to that of someone in their mid-20s, which, as far as I’m concerned, is all that I can ask for and is still nonetheless extremely important. 

The other thing that’s worth mentioning is my pace of aging. My pace of aging is again measured by the epigenome, and we offer at Novos a test called a Novos age test. We licensed this biological age clock from researchers at Columbia and Duke University because, although we could have built our black box tech internally to test it, we wanted to go with what the scientific consensus was for the most accurate and precise of the tests out there. This is a third-generation clock called the Do You Need a pace clock? So, we want to offer the best to consumers. This specific test can tell me the rate at which I’m aging right now. If I’m aging at a rate of one, that means everyone from the logical year I’m aging one year biologically. If I’m aging at 1.2, which, say, a cigarette smoker might be there aging 20% faster than the average person, I am aging at .69, which is 31% slower, and so what that essentially means is that going forward, my trajectory at aging is lower than the average person as well, which is extremely important. In this same study that you need in the pace clock study, the researchers looked at the fastest aging, the average aging, and the slowest aging people in their cohort of more than a thousand people that they followed from five years old to into their 50s. Now. They’ve been following up every five years. Over that period, they took photographs of these people, and then they merged those photographs with a computer. software where you’re able to see individual faces, both male and female, of the tens—again, slowest, fastest, and averagely aging people. They’re all 45 years old, chronologically. But when you look at these photographs, you can see dramatic differences.

The slowest aging people look like they’re six or seven years younger; the fastest aging people look like they’re a decade older. When you compare those two to each other, it’s like a 15- to 20-year discrepancy in how they look visually. This is a superficial side of aging, but it is relevant to many people, so addressing aging is also going to slow down your physical aging, your superficial signs of aging, everything from your skin to a healthier skeletal structure, and so on. your adipose tissue, the fat in your face. All of that is extremely relevant when it comes to addressing your aging.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That’s a great point. Though I will say that some people do all the plastic surgery, fillers, and Botox, I’m always what’s their lab work. What are they? What are they doing? You can see those two by looking at the full body; do they have good muscle tone and all of that? So it’s good to get the bloodwork; where are you at? How are you aging? Can you go into specifics? You’re talking about biological age testing, and what’s your favorite one out of that? You did say that you wanted to look at the mitochondria in that methylation. But that’s an important thing for you. then, like telomeres, that’s pretty trendy to check if you can talk about those.

Chris Mirabile

As I alluded to earlier, there are different ways that people will measure biological age. So you, as I said, have to be skeptical about how they measure it for them and come to their conclusion for their biological age. Different tests have different outputs. Like I said, even for my results, like one test set, I’m 17 years younger, and another one said, I’m ten years younger. That’s a wide discrepancy. You have to look at the same test and compare apples to apples. First of all, if you want to see how someone compares to someone else or if you want to see how you are improving over time When it comes to the categories of biological age testing, people are excited or have been excited in the past about telomere length. Our perspective on telomere length is that it’s a check-off-the-box metric. It’s something that we offer in the Novos Age Testing Kit. It’s one of the three outputs we provide. But what’s most important about telomere length is to make sure that you’re not too low of a percentile for your specific age. For example, if you’re at the 10th percentile or the fifth percentile, you should be concerned because short telomere length is correlated with diseases, like gastrointestinal cancer, and potentially shorter lifespan as well.

Whereas, if I have a telomere length of 78 years old, it doesn’t mean that I’m biologically 78 years old. It just means that my percentile is on the higher end. I’m in, like, whatever it might be—I don’t recall—but maybe the 95th or 97th percentile for my age. Telomere length is interesting, but it’s again, just to check off the box, make sure your percentile is not too low, and then you can move on from that metric. If you want to get accurate epigenetic tests are the most advanced and evolved of the tests. There are other promising areas of what’s called the multinome. You have your genome, your epigenome, and so on. There’s the transcriptome as well as the proteome and metabolome. I won’t get into that for the sake of this discussion because they’re not as well evolved, but the epigenome is where researchers have been spending more than ten years now building these algorithms to detect how old people are and their risk of diseases of aging and so on. then within there, there’s the first generation test, the second generation test, and the third generation test, the first generation test. If your audience is familiar with this field, they may have heard of the Horvath test created by Professor Steve Horvath.

This test was the original, and it was focused on how they were tuning it to chronological age, so they were trying to predict how old you were chronologically. This might be useful for things like rhymes. Trying to determine how old somebody is based on their blood sample. It’s not nearly as important when it comes to the practical health use case that we’re interested in. Second-generation tests then started to train their clocks on morbidity and mortality data. That’s where clocks like the Pheno Age Clock or the Grim Age Clock came from. Finally, a third-generation test. This is what the Novos offers. These are the most advanced tests. These are based on longitudinal data sets. They are based on very long periods of, in this case, about 50 years of tracking more than a thousand people and seeing how they are aging over this period. Who are the people who are getting diseases at an early age? Who are those who aren’t? Who are the people who have had tremendously stressful lives? For example, they found that people who had experienced childhood trauma, abuse, and so on had accelerated aging compared to those who didn’t.

A lot of insights have come out of this. This clock is perhaps the very best in existence right now for predicting in terms of both accuracy and precision, both of which are of utmost importance. We recommend that the middle age test offers that. We say that’s what 90% of your focus should be on—that output. then 10% could be on the two remaining tests. Telomere length, as I mentioned, and then we also offer a biological age output as opposed to a pace output. But that is admittedly less accurate and precise than the pace output. That’s why we don’t emphasize it as much.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Thank you for explaining that. That makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot, like you said, of choices out there. It depends on what you want to see and risk stratify. If you are aging at a high rate, maybe you’ve got to check on the alcohol, get better sleep, or get off the night shift. That’s when I work in the ER I work in the night shift, and I can look in the mirror the next day, and I’m like, It’s terrible, but it’s me. I only like to work the night shift in the ER. It’s just a chill vibe, while there’s craziness coming in. But anyway, how does Novos step in with these 12 hallmarks of aging and explain exactly, exactly what it is? You said that there is a Novos’ core. What is that? What are some other things that Novos can do to help?

Chris Mirabile

First of all, I founded Novos as a public benefit corporation intentionally so that we could do more for consumers, whether or not they purchased our products. So it’s a mission- and vision-driven company. Our vision is to add more than a billion years of healthy life to humanity, and our mission is to make longevity as accessible and achievable for as many people as possible, not just the billionaires who are oftentimes cited in the news for trying to extend their lifespans. How did we do this? We have three legs to come to the company. The first leg is formulations, the second leg is biological age testing, and the third leg is free resources. In the first leg, of the formulations we created, we have three products on the market right now: Novos Core, Novos Boost, and elbows. Vital Novus Core is our foundational product. It’s a daily sachet. This is what it looks like. You tear it open and pour it into your water, smoothie, or yogurt. We have an orange-flavored version sweetened with stevia, and we have an unflavored version with no sweeteners. but that doesn’t taste good on its own. You need to mix it with something. It contains 12 ingredients. It’s the very first formula in the world to address all of the 12 hallmarks of aging simultaneously. Even on the biotech and pharma sides, no one has done something quite like this yet. We filed for patents on this formulation. and multiple other formulations that are similar to this. and we’ve done several studies on it, both in vitro and in vivo. In in vitro studies, we found, for example, a reduction in DNA damage from irradiation and a reduction in DNA double-strand breaks from chemotherapeutics. We’ve shown that we can reduce the size of senescent cells, as I mentioned earlier, by more than 50% on par with the prescription longevity drug Rapamycin.

We’ve shown at the Salk Institute. The study found that we can reduce a process known as oxyptosis, which is integral to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and even certain forms of cancer. and we were also able to show in that same study that we reduced cellular inflammation. We’ve done a case study where participants were tested for their biological pace of aging before and after taking Novos, and after six months, we were able to reduce the pace of aging by 73%, or approximately three-quarters of the participants, by a statistically significant margin. That margin averaged more than 8%, or almost 9%, which is the equivalent of an entirely free month of healthy life per year if you want to think of it in simple terms. and then of those who didn’t slow down their aging, nobody accelerated in aging. You would expect that some people, because of stressors in their lives—working the night shift, not eating healthier, drinking too much, and so on—would have accelerated. The fact that they didn’t give hope that it’s our formula that’s blunting the effect of those stressors. So that’s our foundational product. We have Novos Boost, which is much simpler. It’s one single powerful longevity ingredient that your audience may have heard of called NMN, nicotinamide, or nucleotides. Dr. David Sinclair at Harvard has popularized this ingredient with his research. And then finally, Novos Vital is our newest product. It’s a daily chew. You have four of them per day, ideally with a meal. This is focused on organ health. whereas Novos Cores focuses on the microscopic hallmarks of aging, Novos Vital is focused on organs that decline with age, specifically the brain, eyes, gut, liver, kidneys, and muscles.

I’m forgetting one, the heart, the cardiovascular system, and seven ingredients. It’s got 11 times more active ingredients than typical gummies do. So we packed tons of active ingredients into this formula. and those are our three products. for the second leg of the company. It’s biological age testing. I’ve already talked about Novo’s age three tests, the pace of aging, biological age, and telomere length. Then, finally, the third leg of the company, which we haven’t talked much about, is where the public benefit corporation shines. and these are free resources that we offer to the general public. That’s everything from what we started with, which is our blog with now more than 200 scientifically referenced articles on longevity, written by PhDs and MDs, to newer features like for example, the space age that I mentioned earlier, where you can take a selfie and be able to see how young you look and then get tips for improving your skin health scores. We have a questionnaire quiz on our website that will give you tips on your specific lifestyle and ways that you can make the biggest impact on your pace of aging based on how you’re currently living your life and scientific research. And then finally, we have a mobile app that we haven’t announced formally yet, but it is now in the iOS and Android stores called Novos Life.
Novos Life offers everything from these personalized tips to daily actions for you to be able to start to get into the habit of a longevity-centric lifestyle. to a ChatGPT type of interface that is trained on our data specifically for questions related to longevity. Even a free biological age clock that is more accurate than the first-generation clocks, like the Horvath clock. It was produced out of academia, and it was trained on the Nhanes data set of tens of thousands of people. So it’s not quite as accurate as our Novo’s age blood-based clock, but it is something that will approximate how old you are biologically. We hope that this is going to empower a lot of people to see where they find relatives, find themselves relative to their chronological age, and then motivate them to take on the recommendations that we give them for slowing down their aging. Again, all of this is completely free.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That’s amazing. I love your mission to help people age better and all the free resources. Also. It’s amazing. Now questions about the supplements. Are these things that should be taken daily? All of them, especially the core? Do you recommend they take breaks from them? I’m guessing not because of other analytics you do. But you were saying years. It’s not like that.

Chris Mirabile

I’ve been taking, the Novo’s core and the Novo’s booster products since we were prototyping them back in 2019, 2020. For more than four years now, I have taken it almost every day there are days that I forget, but that’s not that often. I have it right on my countertop next to my drinking water. I see it every day. In terms of a recommendation to not take it,  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with, like, cycling on and off of supplements, but,  generally speaking, you don’t want to cycle off of it for extended periods if you want to experience all of the benefits. Generally speaking, we suggest that people take it continuously. In the case study where we saw a reversal of the pace of aging, that was people taking it every day, during those six months. What I also didn’t mention about these products is that their short-term health benefits, specifically Novo’s core, for example, can increase skin firmness, and improve skin complexion that’s typically experienced by people within one to two months of use, of continuous usage, reduction in, I can’t say it for FDA reasons.

How do I briefly, improve in calmness? I can’t don’t we don’t have any impact on our medical conditions, but we can improve calmness, with some of the ingredients in our formula, which people experience anywhere from the first day of usage to a few weeks into using it, depending on their health, status, and then finally, energy improvements, probably modulated from improvements in sleep, which then leads to improvements in energy in the days that follow. So those benefits are only going to be experienced while taking the product. If you stop, you’re not going to feel those benefits.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That’s what I was getting at. you have to be consistent with products and supplements. even though you might not see something you’ve said they do notice the short-term effects. You have to realize you’re you’re helping longevity and you’re going to see it. That’s going to take longer. Everyone wants quick fixes. No, we’re looking for the long game here.

Chris Mirabile

The same reason to take our products is long term focused. With that said, as a nice to have, are this shorter term, benefits and what we find from customers oftentimes they’ll write a review or they’ll reach out to our team and they’ll say something like,  I was taking Novo’s core for a few months, and then, I ran out and I didn’t resubscribe or whatever, and I stopped, and then all of a sudden I noticed the difference. they didn’t notice the difference. It’s almost like a frog boiling in water. They didn’t notice a difference day after day, but then when they discontinued, they noticed a significant shift, while other people, noticed it. For example, in a real-world example in my family, my father was using a prototype of our product before we came out with it. My mother didn’t know. in more than 40 years of marriage, my mother had never complimented my father on his complexion. But, for the first time, she complimented him, saying that his skin and his complexion were looking very good. that was only after taking our product for a few months. Again, she didn’t know he was taking it.  that was a nice anecdote to experience, but we’ve heard from many, like, countless other customers, similar accounts.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I love it. That’s so cute. about your parents.  Chris, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your passion. I can feel your passion, like, across the Zoom call. It’s great. How can everyone reach you, and find you, and your products?

Chris Mirabile

Sure. novos is novoslabs.com. we’re on all of the social networks as Novos Labs. then my blog is Slow My Age and I’m on Instagram, X and hesitantly on TikTok as Slow My Age.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Thank you so much and we’ll all be following you and your journey. I’m sure.

Chris Mirabile

Great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.