Today’s medicines leave most of human biology out of reach. Approved drugs act on only 704 of the more than 20,000 functional proteins in the human body. In his talk “Future Medicine: How Addressing More of the Druggable Human Proteome Can Redefine Aging” at this year’s 2026 Asia-Pacific Healthy Longevity International Summit (APHLIS 2026) in Hong Kong, Adityo explained that these proteins, collectively called the proteome, govern nearly every bodily process by interacting with one another in complex networks. Current trial-and-error drug discovery cannot yield precisely targeted treatments for the entire proteome, even with AI, because AI trained on existing experimental data creates variants of known molecules and cannot produce anything fundamentally new.
Adityo showed how Verseon combines its advances in quantum-physics modeling of molecules with proprietary AI to design precisely targeted drug candidates that other methods cannot find. Such precision could allow physicians to safely intervene in various disease processes years before symptoms surface, slowing age-related decline – and to offer far better treatments when disease does occur. As examples from Verseon’s pipeline, Adityo described drug candidates designed to prevent strokes and heart attacks without increasing bleeding risk, to stop the inflammation that damages small blood vessels in diabetes, and to work against cancers that resist existing chemotherapy.
Adityo also called for a regulatory pathway that lets developers win approval for therapeutics that change the early, measurable signs of age-related degeneration. He closed with the stakes. Research published in Nature Aging estimates that slowing aging enough to add a single year to life expectancy would be worth $38 trillion to the United States alone, and that targeting aging could deliver larger gains than eradicating any single disease.