The DOCUMENT Seventh Edition

Announcing DOC 2025!

Welcome back to The DOCUMENT, your connection to DOC. While this newsletter took the holidays off, the DOC team was hard at work preparing for our second annual gathering. We have plenty to share as we look forward to the coming year.

First off, mark your calendars for DOC 2025 – October 12th-14th, once again at The Estate at Yountville in Napa, California. Invitations will be selective, and roll out over the next few months, but initial registration will begin in mid-February. Based on your feedback, DOC 2025 will run a half day longer than last year and include more time for networking, group activities, and interaction with the Living Room Lab. We are also combining passes with rooms at The Estate, another feature that many of you requested.

While we’re busy updating our back-end system and refreshing the DOC website, please enjoy this recent article from the Robb Report, which does a fine job describing the unique vibe of the community created at the first ever DOC.

2025: An Early Preview

DOC’s 2025 program will be driven by three core focus areas: AI, Longevity, and Women’s Health. Informed by those topics, we’re already deep in discussions with 2025 Faculty, Specialist speakers, and Partners. We’re proud to announce the first few members of our second Faculty cohort:

Helen Blau, Ph.D., Director, Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology at Stanford Medicine. A recent recipient of the National Medal of Science for her work on cellular plasticity, Blau’s work focuses on the biological mechanisms of aging, stem cells, tissue regeneration, and rejuvenation of weakened muscles.

That DOC Magic

DOC’s mission is to unite and catalyze leaders in health, business, and culture to transform healthcare on both personal and societal levels. In the last few months, we have heard countless stories about the deep connections formed at our inaugural gathering. One of our overarching goals is to create meaningful change and outcomes from our time together, and we’re proud to celebrate when a relationship nurtured at DOC becomes a partnership. Here are a few examples of what we mean:

Ariel Ganz, a 2024 DOC Fellow and seed investor, invested in five companies whose founders attended DOC: Laura Towart’s My Personal Therapeutics, Christin Glorioso’s NeuroAge Therapeutics, Doug Spitz’s I2Pure, Jamie Heywood’s Alden Scientific, and Leo Grady’s Jona Health.
The DOC community responded with extraordinary generosity to Nora LaTorre’s call for support for Eat Real, DOC’s philanthropic partner. More than half a million dollars was donated at the event, and donations keep coming in. Eat Real will be announcing the news in detail next month, but a huge shout out to Michael Tang, Kevin Ryan and Pascaline Servan-Schreiber, who together pledged significant support to Eat Real.
After meeting Faculty Member Dr. Behfar Ehdaie, Paul Martino made a charitable donation of $25,000 to Memorial Sloan Kettering to support Dr. Ehdaie’s work.

Let us know if you’ve got a story like this – we know there are plenty more, and we’d love to celebrate them here.

The Living Room Lab Returns

We’re also thrilled to announce the return of DOC’s Living Room Lab in 2025, presented by SimonMed Imaging, who will provide body imaging scans to a portion of DOC participants. SimonMed Imaging is one of the largest outpatient medical imaging providers in the U.S., integrating cutting-edge AI technology and state-of-the-art imaging solutions to enhance early disease detection and patient care.

The Living Room Lab is an onsite interactive testing suite encouraging our community to measure, monitor, and gain insight into their longevity and health using the latest scientifically validated tools. We are excited to partner with SimonMed and will have a lot to share in future editions.

News Of Note

A demographic researcher at University College in London studied reams of age-related data and came to this conclusion: Sorry, No Secret to Life Is Going to Make You Live to 110 (NYT). He also calls a bit of bullshit on those fabled “blue zones” where populations are alleged to live long, healthy lives. His findings are elaborated (and questioned) by DOC Specialist Karl Pflegerin an X thread you can read here.

A study published by Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics asks: What if aging isn’t a gradual decline, but a series of dramatic cellular transformations triggered at specific life stages? This study posits that aging may “not [be] a linear process but instead a developmental stage sparked by specific molecular cues.”

The New York Times continues its coverage of longevity with a trend piece on the concept of “healthspan”: Why Aging Experts Are Obsessed With ‘Health Span’. The piece features DOC Faculty member and Buck Institute CEO Eric Verdin.

Given our interest in the intersection of AI and health, we read this Bloomberg interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with particular interest, as Altman stressed how many of OpenAI’s 300 million users have come to rely on ChatGPT for medical advice. “Many people who work at OpenAI get really heartwarming emails,” Altman said. “Like, ‘I was sick for years, no doctor told me what I had. I finally put all my symptoms and test results into ChatGPT—it said I had this rare disease. I went to a doctor, and they gave me this thing, and I’m totally cured.’ That’s an extreme example, but things like that happen a lot, and that has taught us that people want this and we should build more of it.”

In related AI news, Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft’s AI division, has hired several former employees of Google’s DeepMind unit to staff a new AI health unit. And Forbes’ coverage of JP Morgan’s annual Healthcare Conference goes so far to say the industry tentpole confab “is almost becoming an AI event as doctors and AI scientists collaborate to turn petabytes of clinical data into generative AI models and actionable insights.”

A recent Axios piece investigates new trends in menopause and women’s health, noting that there are more questions than answers in the space, a key focus of DOC’s ongoing Roundtable on Women’s Health, which continues its work and will be the focus of future updates here.

DOC Curator Jordan Shlain has been busy these past two months, penning several thought-provoking essays on his personal Substack (you can subscribe here) and delivering a keynote on The Moral Hazards of Longevity Hype Cycle at the Buck Institute. Here’s a picture of DOC’s founding doc doing his thing.

DOC Faculty member James Min marked a milestone for his company, Cleerly, which raised over $100 million in a Series C round. Cleery was one of DOC’s inaugural diagnostic partners in the Living Room Room in 2024.

DOC Faculty member Emeran Mayer was honored as a member of 2024’s most Highly Cited Researchers list.
Congratulations, Emeran!

And to end on a high note, Science Daily reports that global trust in science remains high, and that around the world, most people want scientists to “play an active role in society and politics.”

Need To Know

DOC 2025 is less than 9 months away! Our immediate focus is on growing our community and preparing for DOC 2025.

Partners Are you or someone you know interested in partnering with DOC? As we plan for 2025, we’re seeking the right partners—organizations that share our vision for advancing healthcare and would thrive by engaging with our unique community. We value the insights and connections of our trusted DOC community and would love to hear from you. Please reach out to Flora Lels-Carpenter, Head of Partnerships, at flora@doc.health to learn more.

DOC on LinkedIn. The DOC community is active on LinkedIn. Follow us there for regular updates featuring our Faculty and more.

Any questions?
Contact our DOC concierge, Alison, at concierge@doc.health.

❤️,
The DOC Team