May 21st, 2026
Ken Scott and Helga Sands have been features of the longevity industry conference circuit for about as long as there has been a longevity industry; I first met Ken at at the big Undoing Aging conference in Berlin in 2019, just before COVID started up, and he became one of the early investors in Repair Biotechnologies, the company I co-founded with Bill Cherman. Ken is an enthusiastic self-experimenter for personal gain in health and very much an advocate for something better than the present medical regulatory system, particularly when it comes to the long span of years that it takes for therapies to move from laboratory to clinic. Ken is now in his 80s and not one to be patient; there is a powerful argument there for some form of improvement in terms of the right to try and the primacy of patient choice when considering any balance of risk versus reward in access to new medical technologies.
Ken and Helga recently launched the KHL Foundation, a medical tourism concern that seeks to expand the availability of gene therapies that are already deployed or under development. These are relatively safe approaches to gene therapy that have emerged from the efforts of Bioviva and competitors such as Triple Helix, alongside newer developers such as Unlimited Bio and others. These companies are largely focused on the use of local injections of viral vectors, as that minimizes the potential for adverse immune reactions, and on a few genes and proteins known to robustly produce benefits in animal models: klotho, follistatin, telomerase, and so forth. This seems a growing market, and I expect it to continue to expand in much the same way that the stem cell industry expanded, for better or worse. Few companies will publish data, it will be hard to distinguish high quality versus low quality clinics, but over time a few companies will take what has been learned, pay the regulatory costs, and bring the best approaches to clinics in the US and Europe. Meanwhile, for anyone who doesn't want to wait, there is medical tourism.
