Stebbing and the Necromaniac Sisters

This could have been an alternative metal band, instead it is another stupid old anti-aging scam, featuring two young women with a silly theory, and a London celebrity doctor whom his dying cancer patients used to call God as he sold them false promises.

The Kern Family

In July 2025, The Observer brought a story about two young and elegantly dressed sisters and their new anti-aging biotech company:

“LinkGevity, a UK drug discovery start-up, has filed global patents for a new drug it hopes can block necrosis – unplanned cell death involved in a range of age-related conditions. It has won an award from Innovate UK, and funding from the Horizon Europe science programme and the Francis Crick Institute, one of Europe’s biggest biomedical laboratories. It is one of several firms competing to license the first anti-ageing drug, described as a “holy grail” of the pharmaceutical world.”

These Indian-Swiss sisters are Carina Kern, CEO of LinkGevity and former biology graduate at UCL, and Serena Kern-Libera, who is a lawyer and acts as her company’s Chief Operating Officer (COO). The latter is married to the Polish entrepreneur Rafal Libera, who serves his wife’s business as investor and strategic advisor. Libera’s networks explain the Polish dominance at LinkGevity: the Polish-native businessmen Lukasz Rzeczkowski, Greg Jarzabek and Nikodem Grzesiak are co-founders and Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Technology Officer, respectively.

Linkgevity’s business model is based on an idea which Carina Kern developed during her PhD studies at UCL. The sisters postulate that human ageing is actually a form of gangrene, where tissues suddenly become necrotic and die. You don’t need to have studied biology or medicine to see that this idea is just nonsense.

Kern did her PhD from 2016 to 2020 at UCL, in the lab of the David Gems, director of the Institute of Healthy Ageing. Gems’s lab studies necrosis as cause of death (in Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes). Also Kern did C. elegans research with Gems, and discovered that gonad removal extends their lifespan (Kern et al 2023). Unfortunately, castration is not something you can propose for clinical trials these days, and, more importantly: you better not try offering it as an anti-aging therapy.

Hence instead, Gems lab’s research into necrotic calcium signalling in nematodes was turned by Kern into a business model. Even her former employer UCL is excited about the possibility of a necrosis-free eternal life, see the May 2025 announcement:

“Dr Carina Kern, lead author of the study and CEO of LinkGevity, a biotech company based at Cambridge’s Babraham Research Campus and part of the NASA Space-Health program, said: “Necrosis remains one of the last frontiers in medicine – a common thread across aging, disease, space biology, and scientific progress itself. […]

Dr Kern explains: “Necrosis has been hiding in plain sight. As a final stage of cell death, it’s been largely overlooked. But mounting evidence shows it’s far more than an endpoint. It’s a central mechanism through which systemic degeneration not only arises but also spreads. That makes it a critical point of convergence across many diseases. If we can target necrosis, we could unlock entirely new ways to treat conditions ranging from kidney failure to cardiac disease, neurodegeneration, and even aging itself.””

The occasion for all this media coverage was this opinion paper in Oncogene. The choice of the journal will become very relevant soon.

Carina Kern, Joseph V. Bonventre , Alexander W. Justin , Kianoush Kashani , Elizabeth Reynolds , Keith Siew , Bill Davis , Halime Karakoy , Nikodem Grzesiak , Damian Miles Bailey Necrosis as a fundamental driver of loss of resilience and biological decline: what if we could intervene? Oncogene (2025) doi: 10.1038/s41388-025-03431-y 

“Beyond Earth, where microgravity, cosmic radiation, and oxidative stress accelerate cellular decline, targeting necrosis may also hold the key to preserving astronaut resilience and health on long-duration space missions”

Kern et al 2025

The coauthor Bill Davis used to be Scientific Operations Director at GlaxoSmithKline, now he is LinkGevity’s Chief R&D Officer, Halime Karakoy is a student employee of LinkGevity. Elizabeth Reynolds listed as her affiliation Starburst Aerospace in California and “NASA Human Research Program”. Her LinkedIn profile however never mentions NASA, and she left Starburst in February 2025. More interesting is her current employer: the Methuselah Foundation, a life-extension cult run by the pimp and drug addict Aubrey de Grey (read April 2023 Shorts) with the biotech entrepreneur David Gobel and his son Dane Gobel. Another one of this foundation’s advisors is the infamous regmed quack Anthony Atala.

There are however several academics on that Oncogene paper. Keith Siew works at UCL Centre for Kidney & Bladder Health, and was quoted in the UCL announcement with this wisdom:

“…in a way necrosis is death. If enough cells die, then tissues die, then we die. The question is what would happen if we could pause or stop necrosis.”

Kianoush Kashani is professor of nephrology at Mayo Clinic in USA, and Damian Bailey is professor at the University of South Wales in UK and Chair of the Life Sciences Working Group of the European Space Agency (ESA). Observer quoted Bailey describing LinkGevity’s product as “absolute gamechanger.” By the way, Bailey also declares to be affiliated to the company Bexorg, which was founded by the rather unhinged Yale professor Nenad Sestan (who claimed to bring dead pigs to life, see August 2022 Shorts). Bexorg’s business model is to sell eternal life by perfusing your brain and uploading it into a computer.

Joseph Bonventre is the biggest bigwig on this Oncogene paper. He is Harvard Medical School professor, Chief of the Renal Unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Director of Health Sciences and Technology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and member of the Kidney Cancer Program at the Dana-Farber / Harvard Cancer Center. This man is god in his field, and, rather relevant: he also holds equity in LinkGevity and is member of its advisory board.

Justin Stebbing

Now it is time to meet the other member of this board: Justin Stebbing, former professor at the Imperial College London and celebrity oncologist for dying celebrities. Despite all scandals, Stebbing remains the Editor-in-Chief of Oncogene. So you now understand why that breakthrough paper was published in “Nature Oncogene” (as Kern sisters call the journal). And if you wonder why Stebbing is not coauthor – that’s because most likely he was the handling editor. The peer review process must have been incredibly tough!

I first wrote about Stebbing here, when he, in his capacity as Oncogene‘s EiC, celebrated himself as the hero of research integrity while publishing his own fake science.

Stebbing and his mentee Georgios Giamas, now professor at University of Sussex and EiC of Springer Nature’s Cancer Gene therapy, fought against the retraction of that paper tooth and nail, for years.

Georgios Giamas, Leandro Castellano, Qin Feng, Uwe Knippschild, Jimmy Jacob, Ross S. Thomas, R. Charles Coombes, Carolyn L. Smith, Long R. Jiao, Justin Stebbing CK1delta modulates the transcriptional activity of ERalpha via AIB1 in an estrogen-dependent manner and regulates ERalpha-AIB1 interactions Nucleic Acids Research (2009) doi: 10.1093/nar/gkp136 

From the PubPeer posts in March 2017 over my reporting in November 2017 it took until April 2021 for the journal to issue an Editorial Expression of Concern. Because “The Authors have not been able to provide the original data“, the editors decided on “referring this to the Authors’ institution.” The retraction followed in November 2021:

“Following initial allegations of image manipulation in 2017 in the above article (1) the journal investigated the matter and did not find conclusive evidence to support the allegations. When further allegations were raised in 2021, the journal referred the matter to the authors’ institutions and an Expression of Concern was published in NAR (2). The Editors of the journal are now retracting the article for the following reasons:

• The authors’ institutions conducted a formal investigation, and the official report dated 26-Aug-2021 concludes: ‘although the results themselves are not in question (having been verified by the subsequent repeat experiments carried out by the authors), the paper should still be retracted on the basis that the original data is no longer available, and was not available in 2017 when these concerns were first raised.’
• The authors have been unable to produce the original raw image files for either the journal or the institutions.”

In 2017, Stebbing was on top of his power, floating in money, both for himself and his university. Imperial College would have went for anyone’s throat to defend him. But just then, in 2017, Stebbing was exposed for doing things which were even worse than research fraud. In June 2017, The Telegraph reported that Stebbing was under investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC):

“The Telegraph can also reveal that Prof Justin Stebbing, who has treated Lynda Bellingham and Sir Michael Parkinson among other celebrities, has had practising privileges permanently withdrawn by some Harley Street clinics.

HCA, the country’s largest private care provider, has informed Prof Stebbing’s patients that from September they will no longer be allowed to receive treatment from a man who has published more than 550 peer-reviewed papers and been nicknamed “God” by some former patients. […]

The Telegraph has seen copies of letters sent by a whistleblower over the past year to the GMC and Care Quality Commission (CQC), raising concerns about Prof Stebbing’s private medical practice procedures in several clinics. These include asking patients to fund their own treatment using expensive immunotherapy drugs beyond the remit of their licence, supervising chemotherapy regimes “outside his area of expertise” and adopting a “gung ho approach” to patient care and management”

Thing is, Stebbing’s patients were immensely rich yet terminally ill celebrities (including Roger Moore) and industrialists, and some, like New Zealand brewing magnate Douglas Myers, threatened to sue everyone who acts against their beloved doctor. Myers died in April 2017, as did all other celebrity patients of Stebbing. Basically, instead of palliative care to easy their suffering, dying patients were subjected to pointless yet aggressive chemotherapy and immunotherapies which caused them only further pain and misery, and quite possibly sped up their demise. Obviously the only “good” thing Stebbing’s unorthodox therapies achieved was to make this doctor rich.

Also, as The Standard reported in November 2021:

“On one occasion he told a woman who was concerned at the amount of chemotherapy due to be administered to her elderly father: “Just leave the dosing to me, darling.”

Also, the good doctor flirted with a dying 47 year old female patient whom he addressed as “Little Miss Trouble” and who then fell in love with him:

“Stebbing admitted failing to maintain an “appropriate degree of professional distance” with the patient and engaging in “inappropriate communications” while knowing she was physically and mentally vulnerable.”

By 2021, the GMC investigation was nearing its end and Stebbing was about to face his due punishment. Daily Mail reported in October 2021:

“In a ruling that could lead to the 50-year-old doctor being struck off, tribunal chairman Hassan Khan accused him of responding to legitimate concerns about patients’ treatment in a ‘dismissive, confrontational and aggressive manner’.

Instead of taking colleagues’ warnings seriously, Stebbing was ‘blind to the patient safety concerns being raised’ and dismissed those who questioned him ‘out of hand’ due to ‘his displeasure at being challenged’, Mr Khan concluded.

He noted a ‘troubling’ theme that the Oxford-trained doctor was prepared to sanction ‘futile’ treatment in a way that was ‘fundamentally inconsistent with the best interests of patients and their safety’.

In a scathing 95,000-word judgment, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service panel also hit out at two of the country’s most eminent oncologists who gave expert evidence in support of Stebbing.

It said one, Professor Karol Sikora, had given evidence that was ‘fundamentally incompatible with his duties as an independent and impartial expert’.”

Karol Sikora was at that time a popular figure with covidiots, because of his claims that SARS-CoV2 was rather harmless and would disappear soon, no restrictions necessary.

The Daily Mail article also mentions that Stebbing “had admitted 30 out of 36 counts of giving inappropriate treatment to terminally ill cancer patients.” The panel then found “three out of the remaining counts proved while rejecting the other three“.

The tribunal’s verdict arrived in December 2021, while Stebbing was “on holiday in the Caribbean“, as Evening Standard reported:

“the panel rejected erasing Professor Stebbing from the medical register and instead decided on a nine-month suspension as there was a public interest in permitting him to return to practice “as soon as possible”. […]

“The tribunal considered the mitigating factors in this case, including that the earliest relevant events took place approximately seven years ago, that Professor Stebbing has shown genuine remorse, has acknowledged his wrongdoing, and has taken considerable steps towards remediation.

“The tribunal also noted, based on the testimonial evidence, that Professor Stebbing is a highly skilled, competent, and dedicated consultant oncologist.”

Merely a 9 months suspension, and the tribunal even felt guilty for issuing that. That’s because Stebbing is a) white, b) male c) English and d) rich. He also claimed “problems with his mental health“, so it was decided that

“a lengthy suspension was likely to result in him losing his contract at Imperial College London university.”

He lost it anyway. Stebbing was kicked out and his lab dissolved. In 2022, his institutional profile at Imperial received this note:

“In March 2022 he resigned from his permanent position at Imperial College and was appointed a Visiting Professor of Cancer Medicine. He still has an active translational research program here.”

This bit was later deleted, although Stebbing himself admits to have resigned. Sources informed me that Stebbing’s lab has been completely cleared out and that he had no choice but to leave because his colleagues at Imperial hated him. But the university’s leadership was sad to see him go, so they kept this charade with “visiting professor” and of course, no misconduct findings. And they claim Stebbing saved the world from COVID-19:

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Stebbing played a key role in international research collaborations. His work led to the discovery of the antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties of baricitinib, which was granted FDA approval in record time. His Lancet publications on using AI to repurpose baricitinib for COVID-19 treatment have been cited thousands of times, and the drug has demonstrated the greatest mortality benefit in hospitalised patients with COVID-19. His recent book, Witness to Covid, documents this discovery process”

That’s because Stebbing worked as scientific advisor and trial partner for the company BenevolentAI. Funny that baricitinib was never approved for COVID-19 by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). On YouTube, there is a joint lecture by Stebbing and Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote a foreword to his book.

But because the publisher allowed Stebbing to remain the EiC of Oncogene (and Giamas as EiC of another Springer Nature journal), they were able to save this paper with a correction:

J Stebbing, H Zhang , Y Xu , L C Lit , A R Green , A Grothey , Y Lombardo, M Periyasamy , K Blighe , W Zhang , J A Shaw , I O Ellis , H J Lenz , G Giamas KSR1 regulates BRCA1 degradation and inhibits breast cancer growth Oncogene (2015) doi: 10.1038/onc.2014.129 

This is the shameless Correction from April 2021 with which Springer Nature allowed Stebbing and Giamas to close the case:

“Following the publication of this article, the authors noted an error in the labelling of cell lines. Figure 2a and respective legend should be labelled as MDA231 cells, not T47D. Supplementary Fig. 3 and respective legend should be labelled as T47D cells, not as MDA231. This clarification is important to elucidate the use of similar blots in Figs. 2a and 4b following KSR1 silencing in MDA231 cells.”

More recently, Stebbing became a columnist for The Conversation. There, the upper professional class Englishman Stebbing brings us celebrity news about King Charles’ eating habits, Princess of Wales Kate Middleton’s cancer status, actor Dolph Lundgren’s cancer recovery, or scientific breakthroughs like Liu et al 2024 where “COVID caused cancer tumours to shrink“, or nutrition advice like “All the reasons a cup of coffee really can be good for you“. Also, Stebbing explained “Why a daily glass of milk really could reduce bowel cancer risk“, based on the Oxford University study Papier et al 2024:

“The analysis revealed that participants who consumed an additional 244g of milk per day – roughly equivalent to one large glass containing 300mg of calcium – had a 17% lower risk of developing bowel cancer. This reduction in risk applied to various types of milk, including whole, semi-skimmed and skimmed.”

See how elegantly I brought you back to calcium, as the source of ageing and death?

The Blueprint Theory

Popular Mechanics also reported in July 2025 about the genius sisters and their company:

“Decades later, while working at the Babraham Research Campus, affiliated with the University of Cambridge, Kern developed what she calls the “Blueprint Theory” of aging. The theory investigates the ultimate origins of aging, and most importantly, the key areas where intervention can deliver the most health benefits. The inspiration for the theory’s structure comes from a technique in the world of finance known as “factor modeling,” a statistical method that can help understand driving factors of complex systems—whether money markets or, in this case, human biology.

And one of those key factors, or “nodes” as Kern calls them, is necrosis. Scientists have known about this self-destructive cellular process for more than a century, but it wasn’t until microscopy improved in the 1970s that they began to understand exactly why necrosis was so damaging.

“The crux of necrosis is loss of calcium-ion gradients,” Kern says. “Levels of calcium inside the cell are typically 10,000 to 100,000 times lower than outside. Calcium is a key signaling molecule, meaning it controls lots of different processes within your cell. And so upon stress, you lose this regulation and then you’re initiating multiple pathways in a heightened and really destructive manner within the cell.””

And here is the grand preprint explaining Kern’s ridiculous Blueprint Theory:

Carina Kern, Richard Faragher, Tina Woods, Joseph Bonventre, Annalisa Jenkins, Justin Stebbing The Architecture of Aging: How Ageing Drives Disease (Blueprint Theory) MDPI preprints (2024) doi: 10.20944/preprints202310.1387.v4

“Here we propose a new theory that aims to provide a blueprint-type understanding of ageing and disease aetiology, working across multiple scientific disciplines. Supported by specific examples, we demonstrate that the primary driver of much of age-related diseases is the futile triggering of specific biological pathways in a pathological manner, which we term pathophysiological pathways or patho-pathways.”

The rest of the preprint is a word salad. Stebbing is aboard this time, other coauthors are Bonventre and LinkGevity’s other board members: the British biotech entrepreneur Annalisa Jenkins, and Richard Faragher, professor of gerontology at the University of Brighton in UK. Tina Woods is another anti-aging entrepreneur, now employed by the International Institute of Longevity in Warsaw, Poland (is this Polish connection a coincidence?). Woods and Kern managed to smuggle their Blueprint Theory into their Nature Medicine paper on anti-aging (Woods et al 2025), with US anti-aging researchers including Nir Barzilai. The Warsaw institute, which is in reality a longevity clinics business, doesn’t say who owns it, only names its founder and CEO Joanna Bensz, and advisors like Woods and Eric Verdin, President of the Buck Institute of Aging in USA, whose scientists are on that Woods et al paper.

Kern really seems to think that she revolutionised all of sciences with her Blueprint brainfart, the problem however is that many important men and women, some with some serious money to invest, believe in Kern’s genius.

Popular Mechanics mentioned that “Kern remains laser-focused on […] clinical trials of her anti-necrotic that will begin later in 2025 and last for two to three years.” Their plan is to use some secret “Anti-Necrotics™” drugs to prevent old age and even death.

Nowhere could I find what these drugs might be, but there are clues, here in Observer:

“LinkGevity has patented a drug intended to block calcium pathways […] The proposed initial trials would be with patients vulnerable to kidney disease, because the organ is particularly susceptible to necrosis and ageing. The firm could initially apply for the drug to be licensed for kidney disease and later submit an application for it to be approved as an anti-ageing drug.”

A March 2025 press release announced an Innovate UK Smart Grant to Linkgevity for “a one-year project involving the company’s Anti-Necrotic™ technology, specifically around acute tubular necrosis (ATN), which is a leading cause of kidney dysfunction“, financial details are secret. Maybe the plan is to create immortal kidneys which will survive their owner? Can Professor Bonventre maybe start with himself?

So what are these secret anti-necrotic drugs Linkgevity wants to use? The MDPI preprint gave a clue:

“One example of the latter goes so far as identifying a new class of drugs that is a first-in-class means to block cellular necrosis (unprogrammed, accidental cell death), see (Kern et al., 2024).”

Kern, C.C., Justin, A.W., Davis, B., Faragher, R., Peterson, J., Roch, A., Anstett, V., Denney, S., Grzesiak, N., Winfield, I., Cronk, D., Winfield, N., Brandenberg, N., Stebbing, J. and Bonventre, J., 2024. Anti-necrosis agents as a new class of drugs. In preperation [sic!].

This Kern et al 2024 paper however hasn’t been published yet. So the drugs remain secret.

But we can safely assume that these mysterious Anti-Necrotic™ drugs must belong to some of the many approved calcium channel blockers which are used in ATN therapy, like diltiazem, nifedipine, verapamil, gallopamil, or lacidipine.

LinkGevity’s business model of life extension and space exploration with magic drugs is actually very clever. There are many very rich men who would like to spend many more decades with their money while escaping the impending collapse of climate and civilisation on Earth, which their own self-enrichment causes. That is why Elon Musk and others dream of colonies on Mars or even in a different solar system, where only the very rich men (and their chosen breeding females) will be allowed to go, and to live there forever, serviced by robots. All thanks to science!

Problem is, while you can very well bribe science, you cannot bribe nature. OK, except for that other kind of Nature, like “Nature Oncogene“.

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