Joseph Raffaele, M.D., is the co-founder of PhysioAge Medical Group, a clinical practice in New York City that is at the leading edge of the emerging field of medicine focused on scientifically sound approaches to staying younger longer.

As a clinician, researcher and educator in the subspecialty known as Age Management Medicine, Dr. Raffaele has for the past 15 years been helping advance innovative, evidence-based approaches to extending “healthspan”— keeping the body young and vital whatever its chronological age.

Dr. Raffaele began his career as a traditional physician with an internal medicine practice and a teaching post at Dartmouth Hitchcock Clinic. He became interested in a new field then being called anti-aging medicine, and in 1997 moved to New York to open Anti-Aging Medicine Associates of Manhattan, a practice employing biodentical hormone replacement therapy, an individualized nutritional supplement program and diet and fitness strategies targeting the aging process.

A turning point came in 2002, when Dr. Raffaele began exploring biomarkers of aging, an area that a few forward-thinking physicians and bio-scientists had begun to focus on a few years earlier. He brought into his clinical practice the same equipment and diagnostic devices that researchers used in clinical studies to identify and measure physiological processes that declined with age. After periodic measurements of these processes in his own patients, he began to see patterns in the way that certain therapies, such as hormone replacement, seemed to lead to improvements in certain biomarkers.

In 2004, Dr. Raffaele teamed with a software developer to design a program for collecting and aggregating the data being generated from his patients. Then he brought in a Stanford biostatistician to take the software to the next level: analysis that compared the biomarker measurement of each of a patient’s organ systems to that of the entire database. It yielded a physiological age for each organ system and the body as a whole. The practice was renamed PhysioAge Medical Group as Dr. Raffaele used his growing biomarker database to develop and refine the software.

In 2008, he established PhysioAge Systems to license the proprietary software and provide clinical training to physicians around the country who wanted to incorporate the biomarker approach into their practices. PhysioAge Medical Group now operates in Salt Lake City; Irvine, California; and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Dr. Raffaele has recently focused his clinical research interests on the role of telomeres in aging and the potential benefits of TA-65, a natural compound discovered to be an activator of their critical enzyme, telomerase. Since 2006, he has been a member of the scientific advisory board of TA Sciences, which licenses TA-65 from Geron, the biotech company that discovered it. Dr. Raffaele recently conducted an observational study of 114 PhysioAge patients, collaborating with three eminent telomere biologists, and the results—the first human study documenting the beneficial effects of TA-65—were published in published, in the journal Rejuvenation Research.

Dr. Raffaele has been an invited lecturer at the Joint Conference of the National Council on Aging and the American Society on Aging, where he spoke on “The Promise and Peril of Anti-Aging Medicine”;  the Foundation for Anti-Aging; Age Management Medicine Group; American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine;  and Worldlink Medical.

He has appeared on the Today show, National Public Radio and the local news broadcasts of NBC and ABC in New York, and been quoted in The New York Times, Vogue, Elle, New York Post, and France’s Le Nouvel Observateur. He has written about his experiences as an age management clinician for the journal Geriatrics.

Dr. Raffaele earned a degree in philosophy at Princeton University and his MD at Hahnemann University Medical School in 1989. He served his residency at The New York Hospital/Cornell University Medical Center. He’s is a member of the American College of Physicians, is board certified in internal medicine and a diplomate of the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine.