Interview with Prof. Joao Pedro De Magalhaes and Dr. Alina Chan, Centaura

December 15, 2020

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Today I am joined by Professor Joao Pedro De Magalhaes, Chief Scientific Officer at Centaura and Dr. Alina Chan, a Human Artificial Chromosome project consultant at Centaura, which is an ambitious and industry-defining project aimed at fighting aging. Centaura aims to prevent and reverse aging, keeping people healthy and functional both cognitively and physically, by studying the biological origins of age-related processes and developing targeted therapies to combat the root causes.

Prof. João Pedro de Magalhães

Prof. João Pedro de Magalhães is a Chief Scientific Officer at Centaura, an ambitious and industry-defining project aimed at fighting aging. Centaura aims to prevent and reverse aging, keeping people healthy and functional both cognitively and physically, by studying the biological origins of age-related processes and developing targeted therapies to combat the root causes.

Joao Pedro graduated in Microbiology in 1999 at the Escola Superior de Biotecnologia in his hometown of Porto, Portugal, and in 2004 obtained a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Namur in Belgium. Following further studies in genetics at Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA), in 2008 Prof. de Magalhães joined the faculty of the University of Liverpool, forming his own research group to investigate genomic approaches to aging. His group’s research on genetics, aging and longevity has been featured widely in scientific publications, including Science, Nature, Scientific American, New Scientist, and others.

He is the author of over 100 scientific papers. In addition, he harbors a deep and lasting interest in technological trends and their future impact on society. His articles on how technology promises to shape the human condition have been published in magazines including Futures and The Futurist, as well as in newspapers such as The Independent.

Prof. de Magalhães has given over 100 invited talks at international conferences, including three TEDx talks and speeches at many academic institutions and companies (e.g. Google’s Calico and Allianz). He has made regular media appearances with organizations including BBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Financial Times and many others.

Dr. Alina Chan

She is a recent Human Frontier Science Program fellow working at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. With 12+ years of research training in medical genetics, biochemistry, synthetic biology, and viral and non-viral vector engineering, Dr. Chan’s focus throughout the past 6 years has been on developing next generation gene therapy technologies. These aim to widen the breadth of existing gene editing and cell engineering approaches so that more complex human diseases and traits, such as aging, can be targeted via gene therapy.

These technologies expand on current approaches to gene editing and cell engineering with the
aim of using gene therapy to treat more complex human diseases and traits, including aging.