Meet Camillo Ricordi | Camillo Ricordi

We had the good fortune of connecting with Camillo Ricordi and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Camillo, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
My professional mission as been and continues to be to find a cure for type 1 diabetes, the tip of the iceberg of the autoimmune disease pandemic, affecting 20% of the population with 100 different conditions. Autoimmunity develops when aberrant inflammatory and immune reactions lead your own immune system to mistakenly attack cells or tissues of your own body. Some of the autoimmune risk factors are preventable and are similar to those contributing to severe disease progression in COVID-19, or to chronic diseases associated with unhealthy, accelerated aging. What is happening is that a state of subclinical inflammation prematurely consumes our own stem cells’ regenerative and repair capability. This challenge goes well beyond the accelerated aging observed in diabetes, but it affects 90% of the population over 65 years of age and is responsible for 90% of healthcare spendings (now over $3.8 trillion/year in the US alone). For the past three years, and for the first time in history, the lifespan in the US has decreased and it is thought that children born now could be the first generation living less than their parents.

The problem is not due to unavoidable genetic factors, but rather to lifestyle, unhealthy nutrition and insufficient protective molecules that progressively decrease with the advancement of age.

I thought that we need a major paradigm shift in healthcare systems that currently rely on a profit chain that prospers on a growing tide of age-related chronic diseases, while should invest in people’s health rather than treating them only when they become “patients”. I decided that I should do something more than just continuing the fight to cure of diabetes and other severe diseases such as COVID-19, chronic renal disease, pulmonary, osteoarticular and neurodegenerative diseases.

I therefore decided to activate two new battle fronts in my professional life: 1. I wrote a book, The Healthspan Code, to help one reader at the time while we develop healthy lifespan solutions for all, and 2. I co-founded a biotech company, AION Healthspan, to prevent, stop progression and reverse diseases, which incidentally will be critically important also to prevent disease recurrence after a successful cure. This is not an anti-aging company, or an initiative to increase lifespan to 120 or over 150 years, as we hear more and more frequently in recent times. The objective is to increase healthy lifespan (Healthspan) as opposed to extending unhealthy lifespan, often associated with a painful phase of decline during the last decades of life. Living longer will of course become an indirect benefit of our strategies, but the focus is on maintaining physical and mental health. Our first clinical trial will be in chronic kidney disease, which affects 1 in 3 adults with diabetes, but that is also a global problem, well beyond diabetes, with 38% of the population over 65 years of age suffering from it. This will be just a start, as AION Healthspan overall objective is to prolong healthy lifespan for an unprecedented global impact, not only to avoid preventable human suffering, but also because every year added to healthy lifespan could save over $37 trillion to the global healthcare economy.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I begun my early career after medical school trying to leave the comfort of our Milan-based family life to pursue my dreams. Initially at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, where I developed the method to extract insulin producing cells from the human pancreas, the so called islet of Langerhans or pancreatic islets. I subsequently joined the University of Pittsburgh Transplant Institute, where Prof. Thomas Starzl gave me the opportunity to perform the first successful islet transplants for treatment of diabetes. The rest is too long but available on Wikipedia.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
My favorite spots are on the water, since we can enjoy over 150 marine sanctuaries, reefs and amazing destinations in biscayne bay and in the Keys. However if you are a land kind of animal, there are fantastic restaurants and clubs, starting from our favorite, Casa Tua in James Avenue. We are often there on Wednesdays as they have karaoke night, and my wife Ni Wang is a fantastic singer, among other amazing qualities. She won X-factor in Shanghai with 30,000 competing singers and she loves to sing at every opportunity. We love also Cipriani downtown, Baiocco, Ferraro’s Kitchen, Battubelin, Riviera Focacceria and, if you like sushi, Shakudo near the Design District, where we go at least once a week. If you like fishing, Miami is a Heaven, whether you have a multimillion boat, a small inflatable, or just surf-casting from the shore. In fact, we often catch dinner from the bridge in our neighborhood in Bay Point, without even taking our boat.

I would also recommend to take an excursion to the Bahamas if you can, as there are seaplanes leaving from Miami or Fort Lauderdale and you don’t have to go to the best islands on earth, the Exhumas, to enjoy fantastic waters. Bimini is reachable in less than 30 minute flight, one hour (fast) boat, or a couple of hours fast ferry from Miami.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I think you may enjoy interviewing Ni Wang. Sometimes I think she is from another planet, a gift from the Gods, who speaks 6 languages, an accomplished musician, singer, painter, performer … who left everything artistic to turn to business, becoming a serial entrepreneur, from fashion to import-export, to photovoltaic … solar energy. She was an ambassador for Chopard, Graff … never missed a Cannes festival or other major international events, until she made Miami her home since January 2020… stuck in Miami during the Pandemic, she decided to become my wife and made Miami her home.

Of course you have other interesting business people, from Valeria and Ugo Campello (Cosa Bella) to Ugo Colombo and Harvey Hernandez (developers), Alicia Lamadrid Cervera (real estate), Emilio and Gloria Estefan … or our neighbors Enrique Iglesias and Jonas Borthers

Website: www.Fit4Healthspan.org www.theCureAlliance.org www.diabetesresearch.org

Instagram: CamilloRicordiMDofficial and Fit4Pandemic

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Twitter: @camilloricordi

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