Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four topical stories focused on healthspan, systems change and AI for impact. Enjoy!
1. The UK is building the world’s biggest outcomes fund
Payments by results is the good idea that has never really got off the ground. Despite, or because of that, the UK is doubling down on it. Its new £500 million Better Futures Fund is apparently the largest outcomes fund in the world.
It will commission social outcomes partnerships, where government payments follow measured improvements such as school attainment, youth employment and lower reoffending. It’s aiming to reach 200,000 people over the next ten years.
Government cash is to be matched one-for-one by local councils, philanthropists and social investors, taking the potential pool to £1 billion. The predecessor Life Chances Fund spent £52 million on 29 projects between 2016 and 2025; at least 90% of the 50,000 people it engaged achieved at least one outcome. Round 2 opens in summer 2027 and will target areas with the highest child poverty.
The So What: Outcomes funding is moving from pilot to plumbing in how government buys social change.
2. Microdosing Ozempic for longevity: the mice look great
Telehealth firms are now marketing microdoses of GLP-1 drugs as anti-ageing products, and Scientific American has asked what the evidence actually shows.
The most-cited result is in mice: Danica Chen’s team at UC Berkeley gave 20-month-old female mice daily semaglutide, and they ate about a quarter less, lived almost 100 days longer, and scored better on strength and memory tests, with less inflammation and cellular senescence. A matched calorie-restriction diet reproduced some effects, but the drug group outperformed on memory and blood sugar, suggesting a mechanism beyond eating less.
Human data are thinner: semaglutide slowed epigenetic clocks in a small trial of adults with HIV, and a Novo Nordisk preprint, not yet peer-reviewed, estimated organs up to four years younger on biological ageing clocks. Nobody yet knows whether microdoses, often compounded and loosely regulated, do any of this.
The So What: GLP-1 longevity is mouse data plus marketing, exciting but let’s wait for human results.
3. Longevity Grok - your personal longevity guru
My guilty secret is I love Grok Bot. I wasn’t expecting to, having little time for the name or toxic politics, but it’s a brilliant product and blows Claude out of the water, for my use cases at least. That’s the topic for another post, but the recent announcement by longevity gurus David Sinclair and Insilico Medicine (a longevity biotech) uses it as a tool to provide its Personal Longevity Super Intelligence agent:
“Running within Grok Bot's secure environment, it coordinates a team of up to 30 specialized AI agents, standardizes heterogeneous records with clinical coding systems such as LOINC, RxNorm, and UCUM, and uses always-on routines to monitor longevity science updates, organize incoming data, and keep the personal health state current without constant re-prompting”.
Basically, it spins up 30 agents to explore, research and opine on every aspect of your health conditions, both real and imagined.
The So What: A good use for how AI can make sense of the overwhelming amount of information and make it personalized and relevant.
4. Aphid farmers use tranquilisers
(I wonder how often those four words have been used as a sentence….?)
It turns out that humans aren’t the only species to co-copt others to do their bidding. In a fun example of mutualism, ants have been known to ‘farm’ aphids; basically milking the aphids for their sweet honeydew.
Ants have been known to bite aphids’ wings off so they can’t fly away, and even secrete a substance which acts as a tranquiliser and keeps them docile, without thoughts of escape.
+ Looking Forward Jobs
A new occasional section. Three roles this week, one for each lane: democracy, health ecosystems and community / AI.
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Democracy, Rights & Governance Director. (Los Altos, CA, USA - $315k pa).
Sanofi. Global Lead, Health Ecosystem & Innovation. (Boston, MA, USA - $200-$300k)
Renaissance Philanthropy. Events and Community Manager, Center for Civic Futures. (Remote, $130K - $150K)
That’s all for now. Happy, safe weekend, everyone.
Stephen