The INSURTECH Book

Genomics 101 – The Search for a Better Life Expectancy Predictor Leads GWG Life to a Science Lab

By Jon Sabes

CEO, Life Epigenetics and CEO, GWG Holdings, Inc

When I first visited the human genetics and biostatistics lab at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2015, life insurance was not on the mind of the researchers. While the genomic revolution that began decades earlier raised the spectre of insurance underwriting based on our genetic code, no one seemed to be paying much attention to the more recent epigenetic revolution and its implications in predicting mortality and lifespan.

That autumn day, I had an appointment to meet Dr Steven Horvath,¹ the unassuming German immigrant who, as a UCLA professor, had developed the technology that came to be known as “Horvath’s Clock”, a predictor of human mortality that promised to be far more accurate than anything coming before. Dr Horvath is a recognized expert on ageing who has focused his research on finding the root causes of ageing encoded in the DNA molecule. In 2013, he reported he had found that human cells have an internal “biological age” and “biological clock” at the DNA molecular level that is indicative of the ageing process. His work was hailed as groundbreaking and featured in the scientific journal Nature.² It was research that caught the eye of my brother Steve – he has a PhD in chemistry and he flagged it for me. That’s what led me to California, armed with the idea that this research could help ...