Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery and biomarker development. He is also the founder of Deep Longevity, Inc., a spin-off of Insilico Medicine developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity for healthcare providers and the life insurance industry. In 2020, Deep Longevity was acquired by Regent Pacific (HK: 0575), resulting in a 3x+ increase in stock price since acquisition.
Since 2015, he has invented critical technologies in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) for the generation of novel molecular structures with desired properties, as well as synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered applications of deep learning for predicting human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling.
Under his leadership, Insilico has raised over $50 million in multiple rounds from expert investors, opened R&D centers in Baltimore, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, and partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions.
Prior to founding Insilico, he held senior roles at ATI Technologies (a GPU company acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, and the Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012, he has published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers and two books, including The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy (Macmillan, 2013).
He serves on the editorial boards of Trends in Molecular Medicine, Aging Research Reviews, Aging, and Frontiers in Genetics, and founded and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research, Drug Discovery and AI Forum, the world’s largest event on aging in the pharmaceutical industry.
He holds two undergraduate degrees in Computer Science from Queen’s University (Canada), a Master’s in Biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD in Physics and Mathematics from Moscow State University. In December 2020, he developed and launched an online Longevity Medicine Course for physicians, taken by over 3,000 medical professionals. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and is a Canadian citizen permanently residing in Hong Kong.
