Unilever Ventures Takes a Minority Investment in Novos

PARIS — Unilever Ventures has taken a minority stake in Novos, a science-first longevity biotech company.

Chris Mirabile founded Novos in 2019 and serves as the New York-based company’s chief executive officer.

“Unilever Ventures’ investment in Novos reflects our shared belief in science-led approaches to longevity made accessible and achievable for all,” said Anna Ohlsson-Baskerville, a partner at Unilever Ventures, Unilever’s global corporate venture capital arm. “We are thrilled to partner with Chris Mirabile as Novos continues to demonstrate the power of its nutraceuticals portfolio with further clinical studies and a growing repertoire of published peer-reviewed research.”

Mirabile has been interested in longevity since he was 16 years old, after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. “I came to look at health from a perspective that most teenagers don’t have, which was to try to live as long a healthy, disease-free life as possible,” Mirabile said.

Then about a dozen years ago, he came across a scientific paper called “Hallmarks of Aging,” which is now a seminal piece in the field of biogerontology. “Reading that paper, I came to realize for the first time that aging is malleable,” he said.

Mirabile understood the first risk factor for disease to be aging. He met with top scientists in the field and asked them whether it would make sense to try and target all of the hallmarks simultaneously. They unanimously said yes. Mirabile also asked whether natural molecules are powerful enough to treat the hallmarks. The scientists answered there was adequate research indicating natural molecules can have favorable effects on causes of aging.

Armed with such knowledge, Mirabile began Novos. After two years of R&D, its flagship product Novos Core, with a nutritional formula, was formulated. Its patent was filed in 2020, and the product launched in 2021.

Novos Core’s formula has undergone a series of studies, starting with mechanistic studies, which are in vitro. Findings showed that the formula had a favorable effect on hallmarks of aging, such as DNA damage, cellular inflammation and cellular senescence.

Next up was to see if the ingredients would expand animal lifespan. “We showed that we were able to extend aged mouse lifespan by more than 18 percent,” Mirabile said. That study is in pre-print right now and under peer review.

Novos then went on to run a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial in healthy populations, which Mirabile called the gold standard in medical scientific research, at the University of Surrey. (It is rare for clinical studies to be focused on supplements.) For Novos’ study they looked at functional biomarkers for cardiovascular health.

“The main thing we hypothesized we would have a favorable effect on is flow mediated dilation, or FMD, a measurement of the ability for the blood vessels to dilate,” Mirabile said. As people age, blood vessels are less capable of that.

Also tested were pulse wave velocity, measuring blood vessels or arteries’ elasticity, and blood pressure.

Novos Core improved FMD by 2.6 to 2.9 percentage points versus the placebo. “This is about two- to three-times greater than what’s typically found for other supplements,” Mirabile said.

FMD improved after two hours and was durable at six months.

From Novos

Courtesy of NOVOS

Novos Core improved arterial flexibility by 1.18 meters per second against the placebo at the six-month mark. It outperformed the likes of the DASH diet, magnesium, omega 3s, severe weight loss and intensity interval training.

When it came to blood pressure, Novos outperformed interventions such as nitric oxide boosters, aerobic exercise, high-intensity interval training, omega 3s and dietary sodium reductions.

Mirabile said that according to Novos’ research, no other intervention has performed as well across the three biomarkers in a clinical, controlled study.

The findings have recently been published.

The company’s first phase of development has been focused on scientific validation and product market fit. That, Mirabile said, has been achieved. 

“So now it’s about the second phase,” he explained, “which is sharing this information with the world, trying to increase consumer awareness of the effect sizes that we’re having and make people aware that there’s a difference between companies that claim to be longevity and those that are scientifically proven in human clinical studies to have effects on biological systems that are predictive of health span and lifespan.”

Novos is primarily direct-to-consumer and also available in 180 countries. In the United States it is stocked at retailers such as the Mayo Clinic store, Erewhon in Los Angeles and select Four Seasons and Equinox gyms.