The quest to combat aging has been a long-held dream of humanity. Aging is classified through the diagnosis code XT9T of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), released by the World Health Organization (WHO). The key to future medicine, reverse aging, is close to being tackled by Professor Kim Dong-ik of the College of Medicine at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU). Prof. Kim, also a vascular surgeon at Samsung Medical Center, has been nominated as a research director for the reverse aging subdivision of the Alchemist Project, hosted by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE). This project is implemented by the Korea Planning & Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology. The government’s Alchemist Project seeks to support highly innovative research that may bring sizeable socio-economic ripple effects within a few decades. As a result of the fierce competition over the past two years among 13 professional research teams in Korea, Prof. Kim’s SKKU research team will be awarded ₩20 billion in research funds until 2028. The research team plans to develop drugs, kits analyzing the effect of diagnoses and treatments for reverse aging, and a biological age measuring program, fundamentally aiming for the world’s best reverse aging technology. Prof. Kim implied that hematopoietic stem cells can be the key to the development of reverse aging.
