Gero

Gero is a biotech company that provides therapeutics against chronic diseases. It produces GeroSense, a tool for measuring biological age based on smartphone and wearable data. GERO.AI leverages whole-exome sequencing data for in-human AI drug discovery, while GeroSense createsdigital biomarkers.

GeroSense predicts health scores based on a proportional hazards model trained to rank morbidity risks. ROC AUC validation test reportedly shows the ability of GeroSense to rank morbidity and mortality outcomes in follow-up data. GeroSense system is a deep artificial neural network that extracts health-associated features from the physical activity recordings. The encoder takes the input in the form of a series of step count per-minute measurements for at least as long as one week and compresses the signal into four-dimensional representations (embeddings).

During the training and test procedure of Gerosense, the company claims to have used one week-long samples of steps per-minute recordings for 97,320 UK Biobank and 6,510 NHANES participants, along with recordings samples from longitudinal data obtained for 1,876 smartphone and 723 smartwatch users and were able to produce the most common features present in the motion data.

Gero is funded by AI companies, including AIMATTER founders (recently acquired by Google). In 2019, Gero was also named one of the leading companies in AI for lifespan extension, along with Google and IBM.

Key customers and partnerships

Gero entered a research collaboration with global pharmaceutical company Pfizer in January 2023 to apply Gero’s machine-learning technology platform to explore potential therapeutic targets for fibrotic diseases using large-scale human-based data. Pfizer was likely to advance the potential therapeutic targets and be responsible for further preclinical and clinical development.

In August 2023, the company partnered with FOXO, an entity focused on epigenetic biomarker discovery and commercialization. Discussions commenced to form a strategic collaboration between the two companies to develop an AI-driven personalized wellness and longevity recommendation engine based on proprietary epigenetic data.

Funding and financials

In October 2023, Gero raised USD 6 million in an extended Series A round led by Melnichek Investments. The funds were to be used to accelerate Gero's progress in developing therapies targeting aging and age-related diseases and the development of its platform technology. The funds were also meant to grow the company’s scientific team and expand its operations in the US.