DFrom the outside it looks like an annex to Los Trapenses’ Youtopia gym. And in a way it is. In a waybecause 75% of the business belongs to the “wellness” club founded in 2015 by Juan Pablo LeríaThe remaining 25% is in the hands of doctors Cristián Arriagada and Alejandro Conejero, formerly of CLC. This experiment called Younique is becoming more and more common in places like New York and Los Angeles. In Chile – and in Latin America, say its founders – it is the first of its kind: a clinic to treat healthy patients. Inside, there are doctors, chairs for transfusing custom serum, cold chambers and infrared rays.
The concept is the biohacking or hacking biology. “You can increase the memory, battery, video capacity of an electrical device. Applied to biology, this means positively manipulating your own system,” the doctors explain.
“What medicine and science have shown is that we function at a suboptimal level of health, at low levels of performance from a physical, metabolic and neuronal point of view. Sometimes due to a lack of performanceor -because we do not demand it-, but other times because we have nutritional, enzymatic deficiencies, genetic problems and that over time end in an illness that sometimes begins with symptoms of pain, fatigue, discomfort, tiredness or poor sleep, but that finally leads to the diseases that kill people today, which are cardiovascular, neurodegenerative, cancer and chronic inflammation,” explains Conejero.
The idea began to take shape about four years ago, when in a conversation between Dr. Arriagada and Juan Pablo Lería, then executive director of Youtopia, they discussed the concept of creating something that combined health with hospitality.. “He (Lería) had had an experience with his father (Jorge Lería) who was a big fan of Lanserhof in Germany,” he says about the European wellness center. “We started to investigate and this idea of taking health and medicine out of these giant blocks of clinics, where medicine becomes so impersonal, was already beginning to appear in the world,” says Arriagada.
Over the next few years, the doctors visited various longevity clinics: Hum2n in London, Next Health in Los Angeles and New York. That’s when Eliseo Gracia, former general manager of Enjoy, joined Youtopia. He did it first as a shareholder and then as a director. “I had a family history of two cancers, a heart attack, a lot of genetic and mental baggage,” says Gracia. With his grandfather, Antonio Martínez, founder of the casino network, he had also gone to Lanserhof, and the concept fascinated him.
There he came across the doctors’ proposal. “This is what we need to fulfill our purpose of Youtopia, which is to transform people’s lives through wellness,” he thought, “How can we aim to live better and have a better old age?” Youtopia had the capacity to operate the facility, but they lacked the backing of hard science. So they made the connection: Gracia became Youtopia’s executive director in March and from there he pushed the project forward.
And there is a third element in this equation: Silvana Acosta, a surgeon specializing in pediatrics, was at that time in Arizona, USA, training in biohacking and longevity. “When you return to Chile, we want you to be the medical director of the first center,” Gracia suggested.
The goal of Younique – whose shareholders include Nicholas Davis, Ricardo and Roberto Abumohor, the Khamis and Píriz families, among others (see box) – is to optimize people’s health to prevent them from developing diseases. “Nothing is experimental, there is a lot of scientific evidence behind all this,” explains Conejero.
How it works: The place has a diagnostic center, with an agreement with the Examedi clinical laboratories, to take samples“The first step is a conversation with the doctor where he or she identifies certain patterns that may be harmful to your health in the long term – fatigue, ‘I’m sleeping poorly, I’m depressed, anxious, my knee hurts’ – all in a health context. In other words, ‘I’m healthy, I’m working, but I sleep poorly, I have constipation, etc.’ We complement this with a genetic study with a buccal swab that makes a fairly accurate scan of certain numbers of genes that predispose to certain conditions, such as, for example, the risk of having a neurodegenerative disease,” explains Conejero.
Based on the study, doctors determine which genes are positive and then offer treatment ranging from the use of technology such as infrared radiation, to the application of molecular serums, drugs, etc.
An example: certain ailments can be reduced and molecules that stimulate metabolism can be provided through Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), which has been shown to help you sleep better, be more alert, and reduce daily stress levels. Cryotherapy, meanwhile, can be used for recovery from sports injuries.
“There are patients who go through life with joint pain and go to the rheumatologist and find no answers. Or with migraines, fatigue, insomnia,” they point out.
Arriagada adds: “There are two ways to get cancer. The first is pure genetics, that is, when there is a gene that determines a high risk of developing it. 20% of your health depends on that gene and 80% on diet, health, environment, stress, sleep, etc. There is another way to get there, which is related to genetic testing, which is what we do: this will determine which important metabolic pathways in your body are not working properly. When you start looking at those metabolic pathways, they all lead to chronic inflammation, cancer, heart problems, brain problems, Alzheimer’s, neurodegenerative diseases. I don’t know if you have the exact gene for breast cancer, but I can tell you that there is a metabolic pathway in your body that is altered, that you have a high risk of developing one of these problems if we don’t address it.”
80% of the people who have been seen by Younique in these three months of trial – the official opening was in July – are Youtopia members. But the idea is that both businesses will then run on separate tracks.
“As Youtopia, our purpose is to transform people’s lives through wellness, seeking to give people a long-term view of well-being, which is achieved through habits that are sustained over time. Fundamental to this path is to know yourself in depth. Younique allows you to achieve this knowledge through science,” says Javier Khamis, partner and president of Youtopia.
And Arriagada adds: “The dream is that medicine reaches people before the disease. Indeed, today we are going to reach a much more niche audience, but the idea is to progressively reach more people through education.” And he adds: “We want to move from a medicine that treats symptoms and diseases to one that cares about each person living their greatest potential in terms of quality of life and that promotes conditions aimed at a longer and healthier life.”
A month ago, Younique made its debut with a “retreat” at Nicholas Davis’s Alaia hotel in Punta de Lobos.
The president of Euroamerica has just joined the business: a little over a month ago he bought María José Lería’s share -married to Antonio Jalaff- in the Meridiana company, a shareholder of Youtopia, equivalent to 10% of the company.
The rest of Youtopia is divided between the Khamis family, which participates through Inversiones K; Inversiones Baalbek and Condor, owned by the families of Ricardo and Roberto Abumohor; Meridiana, where in addition to Davis there are Cristóbal Calderón, Eliseo Gracia and Juan Pablo Lería. The fourth investor is Inversiones Peumo SpA, formerly Santa Teresita: there are the brothers Álvaro and Antonio Jalaff; the Piriz Yaconi family, Patio COO Cristián Meniccheti, Karim Fajardin and a group of Patio executives, among others.
“We are now in a process where Peumo is going to sell its shares and we have an offerer,” says Gracia. “New people can join, but they can be part of the existing shareholders,” he says. In this way, the Jalaffs would exit the business. In any case, they say at Youtopia, “they are not involved in the board of directors, nor in management.”
