RYNKL, a Tool for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Anti-Aging Skin Treatments, Receives Funding through Kickstarter, Launches on Android

Youth Laboratories, a company dedicated to human aging research, is launching RYNKL, a mobile application aimed to detect and track wrinkles in order to evaluate various anti-wrinkle treatments and anti-aging interventions for Android OS on Google Play Store. The app was fully funded via a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter and received broad critical acclaim.

To help develop and popularize the app and also to create a platform to test multiple approaches to evaluating human attractiveness, the team launched Beauty.AI, the first online beauty pageant with an all-robot jury. Some of the algorithms are developed by Konstantin Kiselev, the team’s deep learning lead, but some are provided by global modelling agencies and academic artificial intelligence teams.

Beauty.AI was covered by Cosmopolitan, Yahoo! Beauty, GQ and many other major news outlets significantly increasing the number of participants and expanding the training sets for RYNKL. 

To receive feedback, develop a team of beta-testers, fund testing and marketing efforts, the team had decided to crowdfund the campaign via Kickstarter. In just 25 days into the campaign, the app was fully-funded and received positive critical acclaim with some of the most advanced healthcare and beauty clinic networks enthusiastically supporting the initiative. 

“We are witnessing the most exciting time in the history of humanity, when some technologies previously deemed as far fetched, are quickly becoming reality and rapidly propagate into consumers hands. The beauty and the pharmaceutical industries are clearly lagging when it comes to delivering truly innovative and disruptive products. RYNKL is one of the first tools we developed to help the beauty industry empower and engage the customer in product development and personalization. My goal is to develop a broad ecosystem for studying aging from multiple perspectives and developing effective interventions that can slow down or repair the age-associated processes. RYNKL will play an important role in this ecosystem and will allow us to validate some of the predictions made using human gene expression data”, said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Chief Science Officer of Youth Laboratories and CEO of Baltimore-based Insilico Medicine, Inc.

One of the leading European health and beauty clinic networks, Klinikk Oslo in Norway, dedicated to extending productive longevity, has supported the development of the app and will be launching series of applications based on RYNKL and Beauty.AI platforms.

"Beauty and healthcare should be personalized and effective. Customers have the right to demand more effective anti-aging treatments and we want to lead the revolution in personalized care. Many of our customers don't have the time to wait and we monitor and support cutting-edge research in aging and longevity starting from simple mobile apps to research-intensive interventions like preventative anti-aging approach, SENS", said Olav Espeland, CEO of Klinikk Oslo.

The beta version of RYNKL is available in Google Play, and it will also appear in AppStore in February, 2016. At the moment Youth Laboratories is also developing a set of user-friendly mobile applications to track pimples, skin pigmentations, allergy reactions and other facial imperfections.

“My personal life’s goal is to combat aging and develop effective interventions to extend healthy productive longevity and prevent age-related diseases. But most people consider aging as a natural process and believe that it can not be suspended. But they do care about their looks and whether the money they spend on expensive cosmetics produce noticeable results. RYNKL will help with these tasks and in time turn into a very useful assistant dedicated to preserving your face and your health”, said Polina Mamoshina, advisor to Youth Laboratories and a skin aging and photo aging researcher at Insilico Medicine, Inc. 

“Machine learning, image and face recognition technologies are changing many aspects of our daily lives. We decided to utilize these technologies for personalized healthcare and anti-aging treatments. Many of our colleagues inspired by the book “Ageless Generation” which presents aging as the most pressing economic challenge and the most altruistic cause, are relentlessly developing new approaches for using mobile devices and wearable technology to advance research in aging. Our first app, RYNKL, helps track wrinkles and tests efficiency of various interventions including cosmetic products, skin care procedures, diets and invasive interventions. This app is already being tested by the the most innovative beauty practitioners, cosmetics companies and influential beauty bloggers”, said Alexey Shevtsov, CEO of Youth Laboratories.

About Youth Laboratories 

Youth Laboratories is a team of computer and data scientists, biologists, biogerontologists and business people on a quest to develop novel biomarkers and anti-aging interventions. Earlier Youth Laboratories helped to launch the first beauty contest to be judged by artificial intelligence ‒ http://www.Beauty.AI .

About Klinikk Oslo 

Klinikk Oslo is a famous Norwegian network of cosmetic clinics with customers from all over Europe, who are happy to travel quite far to be treated by its most competent experts. Klinikk Oslo offers a wide range of cosmetic procedures performed by the most skilled and experienced medical practitioners in the industry: dermatologists, surgeons, laser specialists and cardiologists. The clinic is a proven leader in implementing innovative technologies into daily healthcare practice.

 

InSilico Medicine presents advances in deep learning for drug discovery and aging research

InSilico Medicine will present an update on recent advances in applying signaling pathway activation analysis and deep learning to drug discovery and drug repurposing for age-related diseases at the Biotech Showcase in San Francisco.

Aging research is a very controversial area with many failed claims and promises and in order to establish the proof of concept of its approach, InSilico Medicine decided to build a sustainable business model providing pathway activation analysis and machine learning services to pharmaceutical companies, academic and clinical institutions helping drive innovation in many areas of research.

"Our mission is to extend healthy human longevity and we spent several years developing a sustainable model to enable the company to effectively use massive heterogeneous biological data sets for drug discovery, biomarker development and personalized medicine. With over 20 academic publications published in 2015 and over 150 collaborators worldwide, we are very excited to present our results that will lead to faster and more effective diagnostics and cures in many age-related diseases", said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of InSilico Medicine, Inc and Chief Science Officer of the Biogerontology Research Foundation.

Deep learning technologies resulted in major breakthroughs in image, voice and text recognition, autonomous driving, networking and mobile applications surpassing human accuracy and demonstrating unprecedented results. However, in genomic and transcriptomic analysis, drug discovery and repurposing and many other areas of biomedicine, progress has been much slower. Since November 2014 InSilico Medicine decided to shift its focus on and commit to deep learning technologies despite many early failures showing superiority of other machine learning techniques.

"When it comes to training deep neural networks with transcriptomic and other types of biological data many groups notice the superiority of advanced implementations of SVM, GBM and other machine learning methods. However, there is much to be learned from the inaccuracies of the DNNs that will lead to both new methods to working with biological data and provide clues on alternative uses of drugs particularly when it comes to age-related diseases. Several of our collaborators in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries are already testing these methods and I am happy to be part of the team that will establish more of these collaborations during the J.P. Morgan conference", said Polina Mamoshina, research scientist, InSilico Medicine.

About InSilico Medicine, Inc
InSilico Medicine, Inc. is a bioinformatics company located at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore. It utilizes advances in genomics, big data analysis and deep learning for in silico drug discovery and drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company pursues internal drug discovery programs in cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, sarcopenia and geroprotector discovery and provides services to pharmaceutical companies. Brief company video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l62jlwgL3v8