On July 10-13, 2025, Dr. Aubrey de Grey took the stage at RAADfest in Las Vegas, curating specialized scientific programming for what he called “the leading longevity conference for a general audience.” Standing before thousands of attendees at the Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa, the Cambridge-trained biogerontologist delivered his signature blend of cutting-edge research and accessible explanations about humanity’s war against aging.
But while de Grey educated the RAADfest crowd about cellular regeneration and mitochondrial repair, another revolution was already underway—one that would fundamentally transform how longevity science itself gets done.
Just weeks after RAADfest, de Grey’s LEV Foundation supported the launch of Aubr.ai, an on-chain AI agent that doesn’t just explain longevity research to audiences—it actively accelerates the science itself. This parallel existence reveals something essential about Aubrey de Grey’s approach: he’s simultaneously fighting on every front, using every available tool to compress the timeline between today’s aging population and tomorrow’s rejuvenation therapies.
The Public Educator
RAADfest 2025 marked the first time Aubrey de Grey curated scientific programming for the conference, partnering his LEV Foundation with the Coalition for Radical Life Extension. The collaboration brought “the same high calibre of science I always do,” as de Grey promised, presenting his decades of work on the SENS framework to clinicians, researchers, and longevity advocates.
The enhanced program featured specialized sessions on de Grey’s seven-category SENS framework, updates from LEV Foundation’s robust mouse rejuvenation studies, and strategic discussions about achieving the critical breakthroughs needed to trigger widespread acceptance of radical life extension research. Interactive panels explored how damage repair approaches translate from laboratory settings to clinical applications.
This educational mission reflects de Grey’s understanding that public support and clinical adoption both matter. His RAADfest participation “extends beyond individual presentations to encompass strategic programming that reflects his broader vision for accelerating the entire longevity field,” as the partnership announcement explained. The event’s non-commercial platform ensured that de Grey’s scientific presentations remained focused on research advancement rather than product promotion.
“This is not just an event; it’s a movement,” said James Strole, Director of the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, describing de Grey’s contribution to the conference.
Yet education alone can’t solve aging. While de Grey stood on stage explaining rejuvenation biotechnology to thousands, only a fraction of those attendees possessed the expertise and resources to actually advance the science. The real bottleneck isn’t public understanding—it’s the glacial pace of research itself, constrained by funding silos, institutional gatekeeping, and the inefficiency of scientific collaboration.
The Engineering Solution
Enter Aubr.ai, which represents a fundamentally different approach to the same problem. Rather than broadcasting knowledge from stage to audience, the AI agent makes Aubrey de Grey’s expertise—including decades of unpublished lab data—directly accessible to researchers worldwide as an interactive co-pilot for hypothesis generation.
This shift from education to acceleration reflects de Grey’s background. He received his BA in computer science before earning his Ph.D. in biology from Cambridge, giving him an engineer’s perspective on biological problems. “Damage repair does not interfere with metabolism,” de Grey explains about his approach. “The damage is inert, it’s harmless until it accumulates. Which means that if you target that, you’re not really interfering with the body’s normal operation at all.”
That engineering mindset now extends to how science itself operates. Traditional conferences like RAADfest spread knowledge linearly—expert to audience, stage to seats. Aubr.ai creates a network effect where every researcher’s interaction with the AI agent enriches its knowledge graph, which then improves responses for future users. Knowledge doesn’t just flow outward; it compounds.
The AI agent has been trained on Aubrey de Grey’s unpublished lab data from the LEV Foundation, including insights from RMR1, the first phase of the Robust Mouse Rejuvenation project, that recently completed work involving 1,000 middle-aged mice, extending their lives by four months through combination therapies. While de Grey was presenting high-level concepts at RAADfest, Aubr.ai was ingesting the granular experimental details that make hypothesis generation actually useful.
“Having the agent at our disposal has been transformative for our planning pipeline,” de Grey noted about Aubr.ai’s role in the forthcoming RMR2 study. The AI “identified points of consideration we had not yet encountered through literature, and it was proactive in suggesting ways to circumvent foreseen limitations.”
The Collaborative Philosophy
What connects these seemingly disparate activities—curating conferences and building AI agents—is Aubrey de Grey’s collaborative approach to advancing longevity research. The RAADfest announcement explicitly noted his work “across organizations like the Healthspan Action Coalition and Alliance for Longevity Initiatives,” reflecting his philosophy of “supporting credible radical efforts across diverse organizations rather than building competing institutions.”
Aubr.ai extends this collaborative model into entirely new territory. By making de Grey’s expertise accessible through an AI agent tagged on X (formerly Twitter), the system democratizes access to world-class longevity guidance. A researcher in Singapore can ask the same caliber of questions that would previously require direct collaboration with LEV Foundation scientists.
The $100K Hypothesis Challenge takes this further, creating funding pathways for researchers who use Aubr.ai to develop novel longevity hypotheses. Aubrey de Grey personally reviews submissions and selects the most promising for up to $100,000 in milestone-based research funding. This isn’t just education or consultation—it’s active resource allocation based on AI-assisted hypothesis generation.
“Aubrai represents a radical new way to scale collective scientific intelligence,” de Grey explains. “By fusing my team’s expertise with decentralized AI and the wisdom of the global longevity community, we’re creating something unprecedented—a scientific AI agent that doesn’t just process information, but actively helps researchers turn discoveries into real-world therapeutics.”
From Stage Presentation to Blockchain Permanence
The contrast between RAADfest’s physical gathering and Aubr.ai’s blockchain infrastructure reveals another dimension of de Grey’s evolution. At RAADfest, presentations happen once. Conference attendees absorb what they can, take notes, perhaps watch recordings later. Knowledge transfer is ephemeral, dependent on memory and attention.
Aubr.ai uses Molecule’s Proof-of-Invention protocol to hash valid hypotheses onto the Base blockchain, creating permanent, verifiable records of scientific contributions. When a researcher generates a hypothesis using the AI agent, that contribution is recorded immutably. If subsequent breakthroughs build on those insights, the original contributor receives recognition and potentially financial return through IP-Token mechanisms.
This addresses a fundamental problem in conference-based science communication: ideas shared at events rarely receive proper attribution. How many RAADfest attendees will develop insights based on de Grey’s presentations, but with no mechanism to trace that intellectual lineage? Aubr.ai’s blockchain integration ensures that even preliminary hypotheses and “failed” experiments contribute to a permanent knowledge graph that rewards contributors as their insights prove valuable.
The blockchain infrastructure also enables funding mechanisms impossible in traditional conference settings. While the science portion of RAADfest operates on a non-commercial platform—no product pitches, pure education—Aubr.ai integrates directly with VitaDAO’s VitaLabs incubation program. Trading fees from the $AUBRAI token bootstrap experiments, and validated data gets tokenized as IP-Tokens that can be licensed to pharmaceutical companies, with revenues cycling back to researchers.
The Timeline Imperative
Why pursue both approaches simultaneously? Because Aubrey de Grey is racing against time—not just his own mortality, but that of the current aging generation. His prediction of achieving longevity escape velocity within 12-15 years requires compressing decades of typical research progress into a fraction of that timeline.
RAADfest serves one essential function: building the public support, clinical buy-in, and general awareness that will smooth adoption of rejuvenation therapies once they exist. You can’t deploy breakthrough treatments to a skeptical population. Education matters.
But Aubr.ai serves the equally essential function of actually accelerating the breakthroughs themselves. By giving researchers worldwide access to de Grey’s expertise and unpublished data, by creating funding pathways that bypass institutional gatekeeping, by building permanent knowledge infrastructure that rewards all contributors—the AI agent compresses the timeline between hypothesis and validation.
De Grey’s work at RAADfest and through Aubr.ai aren’t parallel tracks; they’re complementary strategies in the same campaign. One builds the cultural foundation for radical life extension. The other builds the scientific infrastructure to make it real.
“This is not just an event; it’s a movement,” James Strole said of RAADfest. But movements need mechanisms. Enthusiasm needs engineering. And conferences need to be supplemented by systems that turn inspiration into implementation.
From the RAADfest stage to the blockchain-powered laboratory, Aubrey de Grey is architecting every layer of the longevity revolution—educating the public, empowering researchers, and engineering the scientific infrastructure that might finally deliver on humanity’s oldest dream: the defeat of aging itself.
The question isn’t whether we need stages or systems, conferences or AI agents. We need both. And Aubrey de Grey, true to his collaborative philosophy of supporting efforts across the entire longevity field, is building both simultaneously.
Learn more about the LEV Foundation at www.levf.org and explore Aubr.ai’s $100K Hypothesis Challenge at aubr.ai/hypothesis-challenge