Dr. Daniel Ives
Daniel Ives, Ph.D. is CEO and Founder at Shift Bioscience, which is making drugs for safe cellular rejuvenation and mitigation of age-linked diseases through the application of machine-learning to cellular reprogramming.
Daniel is also a founding fellow of the OnDeck Longevity Biotech fellowship, a continuous community for people to come together to build, join, or invest in revolutionary longevity biotechnology startups.
Prior to Shift Bioscience, Daniel worked in the Mill Hill Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute and the Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, UK. Daniel earned his Master’s Degree of Science in Biochemistry in 2009 from Imperial College London, where he also won the Governor’s MSci Prize. During this time Daniel was inspired to pursue a Longevity mission after reading Aubrey de Grey’s 2007 book Ending Aging.
Daniel was a mitochondrial researcher for 7 years between 2009 and 2016, first at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit where he earned his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2013, and later at the Crick Institute. As a Ph.D. student, Daniel joined Ian Holt’s group at the Mitochondrial Biology Unit to pursue damage-removal strategies for mitochondrial DNA mutations, which cause rare mitochondrial disease and are sufficient to accelerate aging phenotypes in mouse models. Harnessing publicly available transcriptome data, Daniel used a computationally guided screen to identify small-molecule tools that eliminate mitochondrial DNA mutations. He followed Ian to The Francis Crick Institute to further validate these small molecule-tools.
In 2016, Daniel left the Crick Institute and personally funded aging-directed experiments using Cambridge-based contract research organizations. After bootstrapping early experiments, he approached Cambridge angel Jonathan Milner and with his support, Shift Bioscience was founded to commercialise mitochondrial drugs for age-linked diseases, incorporating novel aging biomarkers technologies, CRISPR screens, and other tools to dissect true functional ‘drivers’ of aging phenotypes. Shift Bioscience quickly embraced a breakthrough aging biomarker — DNA methylation or epigenetic aging clocks. Unexpectedly, these clocks revealed a weak link between mitochondrial DNA mutations and physiological aging, pivoting Shift Bioscience to a first-principles approach to drug-target discovery for aging and rejuvenation.
Daniel helped guide Shift intern Brendan Swain to develop a single cell aging clock based on gene expression data. This enabled a CRISPR screen for aging on the 10X Genomics Chromium platform, but more excitingly, the constituent genes making up the clock were enriched for functional ‘drivers’ of aging phenotypes, suggesting a causal or ‘driver’ clock for aging. The same clock methodology was then used to identify non-pluripotent candidate drivers of rejuvenation from a cellular rejuvenation time-course (cellular reprogramming with OSKM). Shift is now focusing on validating these candidates.
He was invited speaker at the Foresight Institute, EARD 2021, Metabesity 2021 among others.
Watch Daniel at Progress, Potential, and Possibilities on Driver Clocks and Longevity and Drug Target Discovery for Cellular Rejuvenation by ‘Driver’ Clocks.
Read An Interview with Dr. Daniel Ives.
Visit his LinkedIn profile and his company page. Follow him on Twitter and his company’s Twitter account.