L O N G E V I T Y I N N O V A T O R
Dr. David Luu’s Mission to Turn Healthcare into Longevity Care
by Martha McCully
From biology and medicine to shifting how we practice life, David Luu is transforming how we view longevity through technology, philanthropy, healthcare, and people.
Maybe you wake up to your Readiness and Sleep scores on your OURA ring. Perhaps you measure your blood sugar with an A1c test or glucose monitor. Or know your HDL, LDL, and BMI by heart.
These biomarkers are important, but do you also measure your optimism, your vision of yourself? Or your purpose and impact? David Luu, cardiac surgeon, tech entrepreneur, and philanthropist, says we need to consider these more subjective markers.
“Longevity is not just about biomarkers and testing, or biohacking to boost biomarkers,” he says. “It’s really reductive to only look at biomarkers of health when you have markers of your mission, markers of your positivity, your community, and environment.”
Luu is also a visionary. “I think the future will be how we assess these markers in an objective way. We need new markers of longevity going forward.”
And Luu is making that happen — on a global level.
Defining Longevity Medicine to Redefine Longevity
A leader in longevity medicine, Luu possesses experience, knowledge, and expertise that are redefining not just longevity and medicine — but also how we apply that thinking to our everyday lives. “I’m creating a canvas of longevity with 10 pillars from the vision of yourself to the legacy you leave behind,” he says. “That’s what real longevity is: how to architect a life worth living.”
And he is on a mission to make this way of thinking accessible to everyone everywhere — or in his words, to democratize longevity.
Luu believes “every physician should be a longevity doctor,” combining these new markers with preventative medicine, functional medicine, regenerative medicine, and “technology medicine” that provides data and information for both the patient and doctor. “It’s a combination of all of it,” he says.
Longevity medicine “will work on preventing, assessing, treating, and even reversing the mechanism of aging too, so you don’t have disease in the long term.”
To that end, he has created a certification in Longevity Medicine, for physicians by physicians. He developed a physician communication platform called Longevity Docs that started as a WhatsApp group of 10 doctors sharing their collective information and insights, which has grown to over 1,000 members.
He is simultaneously solving issues and building the technology to do it.
Longevity Docs is free to join if you are a licensed and trained physician, he says. “And you must be passionate about helping people and improving healthspan.”
The platform hosts surgeons, psychiatrists, ER docs, and practicing physicians from all over the world, including the UK, Singapore, Canada, and the US.
Out of Africa: Mobile Medicine in Action
Luu’s unique perspective grew out of his background that combines medicine (his father, originally from China, was a physician in France who taught acupuncture before it was mainstream) and humanitarian efforts (his mother was a pediatric nurse who worked with Cambodian refugees). “Both sides challenged the status quo of medicine; it shaped who I am today,” he says.
After losing a dear friend in a car accident, Luu went to Africa to offer service to others. He was 21 years old and still in medical school.
He brought together doctors, donors, and friends of his parents to support his mission there, driving around African villages on a motorcycle with a headlamp, looking for children who needed medical attention.
He went to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and partnered with Sean Penn to raise funds and awareness for healthcare and cardiac disease in particular.
His first focus is on the heart, as cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the world. “I’m excited about protecting the heart,” he says.
His mission became The Heart Fund (THF), an international non-profit organization which thrives today.
THF works with partners, individuals, local communities, and policymakers and governments, empowering them to provide care for children in developing countries, often by lifesaving operations.
(75% of deaths in low- and middle-income countries are due to cardiovascular disease; 94% of children born with a heart defect in developing countries still don’t have access to care.)
Luu also built a mobile clinic, The Heart Mobile, offering telemedicine, portable devices, onsite testing, digital stethoscopes, satellite communication, and cardiac screening in remote areas to have a positive impact on children where they live.
From the villages in Africa to finishing medical school at University of Montpellier to rotations at the Massachusetts General Hospital to observing robotic heart surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, Luu saw the need for preventative medicine.
His unique outlook was already having a global impact, one child at a time.
Covid Hits
When Luu witnessed the makeshift hospital built in Central Park during Covid, he realized he could put his mobile skills into practice right then and there.
By leveraging his information and tools, his focus on personalized precision medicine, and interest in technology, he went on to develop a digital longevity clinic in Sag Harbor, NY.
It was the same model as The Heart Fund in Africa, but in the Hamptons. And he wanted to get other doctors involved.
Longevity Docs, his network of doctors, is now shaping this new narrative around longevity. “My mission is to make longevity medicine the new standard,” he says. “Longevity shouldn’t be a fad.”
The Longevity Plan
Luu has shared his novel approach with CEOs, entrepreneurs, elite performers, and medical institutions.
He often asks the Fortune 500 leaders if they have a longevity plan. “Almost everyone has a business plan,” says Luu. “Few have a longevity plan.”
He created the Longevity Architect Canvas to help people map out their strategy to “make it simple to live longer and better,” he says. “This is not theory. It’s a tool. A canvas. A way to step back and architect a life worth living.”
A longevity plan spans a Vision of Self, biology, community, environment, purpose and impact, knowledge and legacy, among other pillars.
Luu now advises leaders in many arenas to spread this new approach to longevity. It includes the consumer packaged goods sector, such as L’Oreal and NOOM. Family offices who want to invest in longevity. Academia and institutions such as The Mount Sinai Hospital. And other medical doctors. “We are at the beginning of longevity medicine. How do we make it affordable and accessible? That’s my mission.”
For companies like L’Oreal, Luu helps shape their corporate culture, as well as adding longevity to their consumer product pipeline.
For Mount Sinai, he helps them see the benefit of investing in longevity, not solely focusing on the sick population.
He recently launched the first Longevity Clinical Trial Network to connect scientific research and doctors (such as Mount Sinai MDs) with healthy patients who can participate in clinical trials — not for drugs, but for longevity.
“David Luu is reshaping our view of longevity and, as a result, healthcare itself,” says ROAR forward’s Michael Clinton. “With the launch of Longevity Docs and the Longevity Clinical Trial Network, he has combined technology, medicine, and solutions that will be available to everyone. This makes him our ideal Longevity Innovator pick from the world of science.”
Everyday Longevity
One of the tenets of his Longevity Plan is to incorporate longevity practices into daily life — a practice and attitude shift that is not just about cold plunges and infrared saunas.
He argues that an optimistic outlook can increase lifespan by four years, and that your zip code is the #1 social determinant of health.
“It’s not what you drink or if you’re vegan. It’s not biology alone,” he says. “It’s where you live, how you live, who you live with, and why you live.”
Luu believes longevity comes from what we commit to and do in a seamless way that becomes part of us.
“How do we shift living a life with an end date to having lifelong energy?” he asks. “It’s living with a longevity mindset.”
He says that now we live under one framework of success that emphasizes money and power.
“But happiness, having social purpose, looking and feeling healthy, and supporting your community, that’s the ultimate flex. This is another definition of success. Truly, it’s the art of living.”