Partner content
Berlin’s YEARS clinic analyzes patient health data to identify novel risk markers for aging related diseases and enable earlier interventions.
Last October, a new clinic quietly opened its doors in the heart of Berlin, with a mission to offer patients a unique approach to managing their health and longevity. Focusing on prevention and personalized care, YEARS is a full-service medical center designed to provide individuals with a holistic understanding of their health. Backed by the likes of longevity-focused investment firm Apollo Health, the clinic’s philosophy is centered around empowering individuals to take control of their health through advanced diagnostics and tailored care strategies.
YEARS’ mission is to create a personalized early warning system that can help people understand and mitigate potential health risks before they become serious conditions. Interestingly, the clinic’s founders have essentially designed the facility as a clinical study, collecting comprehensive clinical and molecular data from its patients to better understand aging and age-related diseases – and to improve its ability to prevent them.
Longevity.Technology: The YEARS clinic concept originated from Dr Jan K Hennigs’ experience working in University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, one of the top hospitals in Germany. As a specialist in internal medicine and respiratory medicine, he became frustrated with seeing patients only when their diseases were in advanced stages, by which point treatment options were significantly limited. This led him and a group of likeminded medical professionals to develop a proactive healthcare approach focused on early prevention and understanding individual health risks – and so YEARS was born. We sat down with Hennigs to learn more about the clinic and its unique approach.
Dr Jan K Hennigs is head of medicine and science at YEARS.
During his decades of experience in traditional healthcare, Hennigs explains his frustration at seeing patients presenting with very advanced diseases.
“Very often, the decision we had to make was, can we bridge this patient for a transplant in terms of therapy, or are they too well advanced in that disease, which means we’re basically going down a palliative care route,” he says. “Eventually I and a couple of other medical doctors came to the conclusion that we had to change something. Given the strain being placed on healthcare systems worldwide with the aging population, it became quite obvious to us that we have to start being proactive in our approach to healthcare.”
Clinic-as-a-study model
At its core, YEARS’ philosophy emphasizes the importance of early detection and prevention. Recognizing that many chronic diseases can be prevented, the clinic aims to equip individuals with the knowledge and tools necessary to make informed decisions about their health that promote longevity and enhance their quality of life. But it also aims to generate new insights into human healthspan through the analysis of its patients’ data.
“They way we set up the clinic is basically like a clinical study – a prospective clinical registry – and we ask all our patients to consent to participate in our research,” explains Hennigs. “So we had to think about what we needed to understand from patients to allow us to phenotype them in a very deep and very broad way, clinically, but also molecularly. That’s the idea behind YEARS.”
A scientist at work in YEARS’ research lab.
Supporting its ‘clinic-as-a-study’ model, YEARS’ high-end facility in Berlin has a built-in research lab, where the company pre-processes the samples donated by patients and stores them in a biobank.
“This means that, in about one or two years, we can do the first bulk analysis to understand and identify novel risk markers for aging related diseases, and to develop a strategy that will allow us to act even earlier in terms of interventions,” says Hennigs.
Comprehensive health analysis
Prior to a patient’s arrival at the YEARS clinic, a patient completes an online questionnaire covering aspects including their medical history and mental wellness, along with a pre-visit telephone consultation to understand their expectations.
On arrival, patients undergo a comprehensive testing process, over the course of a five-hour period. The process includes physical assessments from hearing and vison tests to ultrasounds of large blood vessels, mobility tests and body composition analysis. Functional tests include a complete pulmonary function test, respiratory muscle strength assessment, oxygen absorption evaluation, VO2 max exercise test with ECG and extensive blood work.
Lung function testing is just one of many diagnostic assessments conducted at YEARS.
“One of our overarching aims is to be able to see the trajectory of your molecular and clinical phenotypes changing over time,” says Hennigs. “By understanding the changes in the trajectories of the parameters that we measure, we can preemptively identify that an organ is going to become sick, and do something about that.”
Following an initial check-in with their physician at end of the testing day, patients receive a detailed consultation two weeks later after the lab results return. At this time they also receive an individualized report with their individual risk scores, including 10-year disease risk predictions and biological age assessments.
“We use established organ risk scores from the literature, adapting them into ‘organ age’ as a way to communicate health risks in a patient-friendly manner,” says Hennigs. “While epigenetic clocks are among the more advanced biological aging markers, no biological age measure is currently reliable enough for clinical decision-making. Due to issues with reproducibility and variability, we do not use biological age clocks as standalone clinical tools or base therapeutic decisions on them.”
Personalized interventions
The goal of all this testing is to create a comprehensive, personalized health baseline and develop targeted intervention strategies based on the findings.
“We come up with an individualized, goal-oriented strategy – identifying the areas that aren’t optimal, and then we come up with a clear strategy for addressing them,” says Hennigs. “For example, we might get you to try to make a lifestyle change for the next three months, let’s say focusing on a certain diet that might help you with your cholesterol levels or with your blood pressure. And then if that doesn’t work out, then we may have to think about a strategy that requires pharmacotherapy.”
Patients review their results with their YEARS’ physician.
Today, the clinic offers two primary health programs. YEARS Core provides a comprehensive basis for assessing health through key biomarkers and tests, delivering scientifically grounded insights and established recommendations to develop a personalized health strategy.
“The idea is that we check you from head to heel, and really understand how healthy your organs are and where your individual risks lie,” says Hennigs. “We focus on key pillars like, cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors, sleep, mental health is a very important aspect. For all these areas we can start treating with lifestyle changes, but if that’s not enough, we can also treat our patients pharmacologically, if need be.”
YEARS Ultimate is a more advanced program, utilizing cutting-edge technologies and methodologies typically found in research institutions. Crucially, says Hennigs, the clinic only considers treatments with a solid evidence based behind them.
“We decided to focus only on therapies that had at least Level 2 evidence supporting their efficacy,” he explains, referring to the second-highest level of evidence, which requires supporting data from well-designed randomized controlled trials. “We don’t offer typical longevity interventions, like red light therapy or ice baths or oxygen therapy, we currently prioritize treatments with a stronger body of clinical evidence supporting their efficacy.”
“We refrain from offering experimental interventions right now, but one of our goals for the next year is to set up a clinical trial platform where we can, on an n-of-1 trial basis, test individual interventions like rapamycin, for example, and see if there’s an effect, and to generate some sort of evidence for that individual. That is something that requires a lot more regulatory preparation, but that’s the vision.”
Both of the YEARS programs are designed to be completed in a single day, with patients are treated like VIP guests, enjoying private suites and personalized attention from the clinic’s medical specialists. The approach is not only medically rigorous but also designed to be comfortable and stress-free, making the experience feel more like a wellness retreat than a traditional medical appointment.
A patient suite at the YEARS clinic.
A significant advantage of the YEARS clinic is that many of its services are covered by of Germany’s private health insurance companies.
“The way we’ve structured our Core program is to only use established medical approaches,” says Hennigs. “So, while we cannot guarantee that everything is reimbursed by insurers, because it depends on the type of insurance you have, we’ve seen some insurers covering up to everything.”
What the future holds
While the immediate goal for YEARS is to build a “personalized early warning system” for its patients, Hennigs says “the broader aim is to better understand the molecular underpinnings of aging and age-related diseases so that we can then come up with more individualized intervention strategies.”
The overarching aim of the clinical study approach is to build a normative healthy aging cohort and contribute meaningful scientific insights to the longevity medicine community.
“We have set a longer-term goal of 10 years to really have a broad, deep cohort that can actually provide meaningful data to the community,” says Hennigs. “It’ll probably take us three to five years until we’re ready to publish the first results from our cohort, because we want to gather at least three different time points from our patients, so that we can clearly see the trajectories.”
With everything currently focused on the Berlin clinic, Hennigs admits that YEARS’ longer term vision is to open new clinics across Europe.
“For this year, we want to build the proof of concept that it’s possible to run this clinic, that the patients are interested, and that we generate meaningful information,” he says. “The next step would most likely be, at the beginning of next year, to open up a new facility. We’ll probably open one more in Germany, and then we’re thinking about going abroad, the UK, Switzerland, and then see where we go from there.”
Photographs courtesy of YEARS