Founder

Leslie Kenny is an autoimmune disease survivor and certified health coach. After meeting world-class Oxford scientists with potentially life-changing discoveries, Leslie realized the decade it often takes to get these discoveries from lab to consumer was a decade too long. That's when Primeadine®'s parent company, Oxford Healthspan, was born. She founded Oxford Healthspan to identify anti-aging compounds with strong clinical safety profiles and bring them to market as nutritional supplements. Spermidine is the first of those compounds. Read more here. 

Scientific Advisory Board

Professor Denis Noble CBE FRS FMedSci MAE is a British biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960.

With more that 500 scientific papers and 11 books published, he wrote the first popular book on Systems Biology, The Music of Life, and his most recent lectures concern the implications for evolutionary biology.  

Professor Katja Simon is Professor of Immunology at the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology at the University of Oxford where she studies cell fate in the hematopoietic system. She trained as an Immunologist under Avrion Mitchison at the DRFZ Berlin and found that TH1 cytokines are found in excess in human autoimmune diseases in her PhD.

As a postdoc at the Centre d'Immunologie Marseille Luminy, she investigated transcription factors regulating thymic cell death. During her second postdoc in Oxford she pursued her interest in cell fate, studying cell death molecules (Trail and FasL) in thymic selection, inflammation and tumor immunity.

As a principal investigator, she set up an independent line of enquiry investigating autophagy, another cellular process determining cell fate, in the hemato-immune system. Her group discovered that autophagy, the main conserved cellular bulk degradation pathway, maintains healthy red blood cells, stem cells and memory T cells and promotes differentiation while preventing aging of the hematopoietic system.   

Dr. Ghada Alsaleh moved to Oxford in 2017 to pursue her career as a scientist and to join Professor Katja Simon’s group at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, as a post-doc, where she developed a growing curiosity about aging and the regulation of biological processes that are disturbed during the aging process. Recently, she showed that TFEB, a master-regulator of autophagy and lysosomal, is specifically reduced in human old lymphoid cells, which contributes to compromised memory T and B cell responses in the elderly. This work has uncovered novel targets and biomarkers for the development of anti-aging drugs for human T cells.

Ghada has recently been awarded funding for her proposal “Targeting autophagy for the treatment of osteoarthritis”. Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common form of arthritis worldwide but lacks effective therapy. In this proposal, she aims to design a genetic screen using TFEB protein expression as a read-out to identify new potential targets for the treatment of Osteoarthritis and various age-related diseases.

Clinical Advisory Board 

Dr. Paul Ch'en, General Practitioner. M.Biochem. (Hons) D.Phil, Oxford, B.M. MRCGP, is a Practice Partner at the Observatory Medical Practice in Jericho, Oxford, where he is also the College Doctor to Keble and Somerville Colleges at the University of Oxford. He has a particular interest in the early diagnosis of cancer and is the creator of www.cansurehealit.com, a website devoted to leading a cancer-free life. He is also keenly interested in preventing the diseases of aging, cognitive behavioral therapy and acupuncture. Having had his early education in Japan, Dr Ch'en also stays abreast of the latest Japanese therapies and research to promote health, reverse disease and live a long, healthy and happy life. 

Dr. Sandra Kaufmann began her academic career in the field of cellular biology, earning a Master’s Degree from the University of Connecticut in Tropical Ecology and Plant Physiology. Turning to medicine, she received her medical Degree from the University of Maryland, and completed a residency and fellowship at Johns Hopkins in the field of pediatric anesthesiology. Presently, she is the Chief of Pediatric Anesthesia for the Memorial Health Care system and the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Florida. She is also the author and creator of the Kaufmann Protocol, the fulmination of years of non- clinical research leading to the first ever, scientific guide to personalized deceleration of the aging process.