Norn Group is a 'do tank' for longevity.
We think and act to make biomedical research yield more healthy years of life for all.
Norn Group’s mission is to maximize the probability that by 2060 we have interventions
that will let a 60 year old live for another 60 years without a decline in health and function.
Achieving this goal requires both new breakthroughs and improving the processes of research and translation.
Key focus areas:
Forming an ecosystem
Science is making real progress, but largely as a patchwork of exploratory efforts only weakly linked to drug discovery and medicine. Thus longevity remains underfunded relative to its potential impact. As soon as the field can be transformed into a productive industry, where new results can be evaluated with standardized metrics and things that really work have financial rewards, positive-sum dynamics will lead to an accelerating rate of progress. This can happen sooner through real biomarkers and other predictive measures, standardization, and business model innnovation.
(in a few weeks link to the relevant substack post)
Starting long-term projects today
A decade of data can't be made in a day. Some efforts will inevitably take a long time, e.g. training new talent or studies tracking humans over decades. Seeing the big picture lets us identify future bottlenecks to progress and make sure these projects start as soon as possible, as long as we have a pretty good idea of how they should be structured and plan ahead so that a wide range of future advances are compatible (e.g. collecting extra blood samples, or ensuring that consent forms allow recontacting participants).
The Big Picture
Our focus areas are informed by a ‘grand strategy’ overview of where healthy years of life are currently coming from, and how new ideas, new resources, and new treatment paradigms could increase the output of healthy life.
How Norn operates
Progress comes from good people with good plans and the resources to carry them out. Outside of marquee projects, Norn Group continuously works to catalyze progress by bringing together pieces of this trio. This includes nurturing talent for future projects, and making opportunities for impact legible to funders and others who want to support the field. When we don’t have resources to carry out a project (yet), we produce and publish a menu of pre-vetted technical proposals. And we maintain a highly efficient grantmaking infrastructure that can be directed towards specific impact areas by interested donors.
Ongoing programs:
Filling the well
In addition to focused efforts aimed at specific bottlenecks, we run programs to ensure that new ideas continue to feed the well of hypotheses for improving health - In a preparadigmatic field, continuous exploration is a necessary component for progress.
These include creating a community of action-oriented talent motivated to expand life, enabling peer and mentor interactions with a shared mission and competency bar. We also provide opportunities for global talent sharing this mission to access research and entrepreneurship centers and achieve impact matching their potential.
We have established a highly efficient ((LINK IMPETUS FINANCIALS)) grantmaking infrastructure to fund research with the potential to shift and/or create new directions of research into aging biology. These projects are typically risky, and often would not have been funded by other mechanisms, but are key to expanding the status quo.
“Norn Group takes a panoramic view of progress in longevity, looking beyond research results to the dynamics determining whether, and how fast, research translates into human benefit.”
- Martin Borch Jensen,
Founder & President
Stay informed:
Norn Notes is the main outlet for our analyses of the field, science deep-dives, and news about progress and programs.
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