Longevitydocs Cannes 2026 opened at the Palais des Festivals with Dr. David Luu welcoming 200 physicians from 30 countries into what he framed not as a conference, but as peers connecting to build a discipline that "is not a specialty yet." Across the two days that followed, the clinical sessions on geroscience, AI, and diagnostics ran alongside a parallel conversation that mattered just as much: how do you actually build this into a practice that lasts?
Six sessions carried that thread from open to close. Together, they form something close to a business playbook for longevity medicine, told through the physicians and operators who are living it.
Longevitydocs.™ Cannes Summit & Awards 2026, Palais des Festivals
The Chief Longevity Officer Steps In
The first session tackled a role that, as moderator Saad Alam (CEO, Hone Health) put it, barely exists yet. Alam's own company runs roughly 300 physicians across 40 states with nine-figure revenue doubling year over year, and even Hone hasn't filled its Chief Medical Officer seat in three years, because the skill set the role demands keeps shifting month to month.
Dr. Dawn Mussallem, who left Mayo Clinic after 25 years to become CMO of Fountain Life, reframed the job's north star entirely: away from disease management and toward elevating the human experience, answering to the patient rather than to a diagnosis.
Longevity isn't really bolted to medicine. We are now the medicine. Dr. Dawn Mussallem, CMO, Fountain Life
Dr. Sunita Mishra of Neko Health (founded by Spotify's founder) described the role as fundamentally translational: decoding science for consumers and carrying clinical judgment back into the business, fluent in both worlds at once.
The chief medical officer has to speak both languages. Dr. Sunita Mishra, Neko Health
Dr. Vikas Mehta, who runs Cedars-Sinai's international concierge network across Mexico City, London, Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh, put a finer point on it: today's Chief Medical Officer is quietly also the Chief Marketing Officer, doing real demand generation. Dr. Saranya Wyles of Mayo Clinic, who runs the SALUD longevity registry tracking 100 patients across five years and 40+ biomarkers, grounded the panel back in governance: IRB oversight over everything, pilots tested in 30, 60, and 90 day windows, only FDA-regulated peptides.
The consensus: this executive role is nascent, hybrid across medicine, marketing, and legal, and being pulled into existence by patient demand faster than any institution can formally define it.
Our Key Takeaways from The Chief Longevity Officer Steps In
- The Chief Longevity Officer role is being defined in real time by patient demand, not by institutions. Job descriptions change month to month.
- Success in this seat means answering to the patient experience first, not to disease management metrics alone.
- The role is hybrid by nature: part clinician, part marketer, part translator between science and the business.
- Startups can move idea to market same day. Academic institutions require slow, committee-driven buy-in. Know which environment you're building in.
- Governance is non-negotiable at scale: IRB oversight, staged pilots, and FDA-regulated protocols only.
Longevity Founders Mode
Four physicians who left thriving, secure practices to build their own longevity clinics traded the wins and the scars. Dr. Jila Senemar had delivered 5,500 babies. Dr. Jonathann Kuo was running roughly 100 spinal and joint injections a day. Dr. Ken Winnard was seeing 25 to 40 patients daily with his hands tied on the preventive labs he actually wanted to order. All of them left because, as the panel put it, the old model only ever "slapped bandages" on problems that needed prevention.
The first-year trap nearly every founder on stage admitted to: under-investing in infrastructure while over-investing in themselves. Dr. Amanda Kahn ran her own front desk, her own scheduling, and her own lab draws, and didn't bill a single patient for the first six months because, in her words, she "didn't want to deal with billing."
Local resistance was real before it became referrals. Physicians in their communities dismissed their HRT, GLP-1, and nutrition-first protocols as "snake oil," until those same doctors started sending their own patients and family members once they saw outcomes. What changed the trajectory, across all four founders, was treating team-building as a first-year priority rather than an afterthought.
Hire quick, fire faster. Dr. Jonathann Kuo, Founder, Extension Health
Kuo now runs roughly 75 employees across three practices, built in part through a year-long mini-residency model: morning grand rounds, end-of-day wrap-ups, that keeps care consistent before new associates are given full autonomy. And notably, these founders don't treat each other as competition. They refer patients across state lines routinely.
Everything I learned in ten years, in one course. Dr. Jila Senemar, Founder, Jila MD, on the CLD program
Their endgames diverge. Kahn is staying intentionally solo and small, Kuo is building a sellable brand, and Senemar is scaling an online education platform. Not one of them said they'd go back to their old job.
Our Key Takeaways from Longevity Founders Mode
- The most common first-year founder mistake is under-investing in infrastructure and team while over-investing your own time in every task.
- Institutional skepticism fades fast once outcomes speak. Today's critics become tomorrow's referral sources.
- Build your team early. A year-long onboarding or mini-residency model keeps quality consistent as you add associates.
- Referral networks beat competition. The most successful founders collaborate openly with other longevity practices, even in the same city.
- Define your own endgame early: staying small, building a sellable brand, or scaling into education are all valid paths.
Build Your Longevity Practice with Dr. Melissa Loseke, Dr. Mohit Joshipura, and Ali Watson
Where the founders panel was personal, this session was structural: a practitioner-founder trio comparing brick-and-mortar, digital, and hybrid models at very different scales. Dr. Melissa Loseke runs a brick-and-mortar clinic in Omaha alongside telehealth. Dr. Mohit Joshipura is CMO of OpenLoop, a B2B telemedicine platform operating across all 50 states with over 200,000 patients a month and 750+ NCQA-accredited providers. Ali Watson runs a family-office network of roughly 60 physical concierge clinics plus a 50-state telehealth arm, and has personally advised over 100 physician founders.
Their shared finding: modality, digital versus physical, matters far less than clarity of identity, of goals, and of what you will not compromise on.
Differentiate based on value, not based on price. Dr. Mohit Joshipura, CMO, OpenLoop
Competing on price, the panel warned, invites doctor-shopping and erodes margin. Lower-priced patients are better routed to junior physicians on the team than used to compete on rate. The metric that actually matters to anyone buying or investing in a practice is retention, not top-line revenue. Recurring relationships beat one-time transactions every time, reinforced through annual and monthly programs, year-end reports, and proactive pre-renewal outreach. Wraparound care drives that retention: OpenLoop, for instance, pairs GLP-1 prescribing with coaching, behavioral health, and dietetics rather than letting the drug stand alone. Watson described the underlying principle for scaling virtually as building "airtight" quality systems, so clinical quality grows in step with patient volume instead of falling behind it.
Recruitment, not patient acquisition, was named the hardest operational problem in the room. Generic staffing agencies simply don't understand longevity medicine, so community and word of mouth carry the weight instead. OpenLoop's own culture, Joshipura noted, is built around "failing fast" rather than waiting for certainty. And every founder, whichever exit path they're planning (never selling, junior partner succession, private equity, or a capital raise), agreed that whoever eventually buys in will scrutinize retention before anything else.
Our Key Takeaways from Build Your Longevity Practice
- Modality matters less than clarity. Digital, brick-and-mortar, and hybrid models can all work if identity and non-negotiables are clear from day one.
- Compete on value, not price. Underpricing invites doctor-shopping and erodes the margin you need to deliver quality care.
- Retention, not revenue, is the number buyers and investors actually scrutinize. Build recurring relationships, not one-off transactions.
- Wraparound services (coaching, behavioral health, dietetics) extend the value and stickiness of any core treatment.
- Recruitment, not patient acquisition, is the hardest operational problem at scale. Lean on community and word of mouth over generic agencies.
- Know your exit path early: never selling, succession, private equity, or a capital raise all require different groundwork.
Know Your Numbers: Dr. Felix Olale (TPG) and Dr. Jijoe Joseph
This workshop was the most quietly uncomfortable session of the summit. Dr. Felix Olale (TPG) and Dr. Jijoe Joseph (Aesura Health) opened by polling the room: only about 10% of attendees could name their own practice's LTV to CAC ratio. Fewer still tracked ARPM, cost of goods, or gross margin at all.
We don't get paid to think. A lawyer gets paid to think. Dr. Felix Olale, TPG, on physician time and pricing
Their case study was blunt: marketing spend that started at $25,000 a month (since brought down to $15,000) drove customer acquisition cost to roughly $300 per patient, while lifetime value started near $50, meaning the practice lost money on every patient for the first six months, before eventually climbing to around $5,000 per patient.
The single most common first-year mistake, in their experience, is building an entire treatment vertical at once. One practice sank roughly $500,000 into equipment: cryotherapy that ended up serving only eight patients, plasma exchange, red light, hyperbaric, all financed as fixed overhead before any of it proved out. Their advice was to layer services one at a time and run the ROI on each machine before adding the next.
Do not leave the business model definitions to folks who are not in the room. Dr. Jijoe Joseph, Founder, Aesura Health
A la carte offerings, the panel argued, are structurally a losing proposition once you account for consult time, consumables, and follow-up against the margin on a single service. Recurring membership is what actually turns a practice into an annuity instead of a transaction. Their tiered pricing example, memberships at $9.99 and $19.99 a month, with everything else billed in clean time blocks, got the practice to cash-flow-positive at around 30% gross margin, with 50 to 60% as the real target.
Capital raised a warning flag of its own: one practice gave up 70% equity to a private equity partner for a promised 30% perpetuity payment that never arrived. Growth, they argued, comes from acquisition that's still 70 to 80% word-of-mouth, and from scaling through tiers and junior providers rather than trying to clone the founding physician.
Our Key Takeaways from Know Your Numbers
- Learn your own numbers: LTV, CAC, ARPM, and gross margin are not optional knowledge for a practice owner.
- Do not build a full treatment vertical in year one. Layer services one at a time and test ROI per machine before scaling.
- A la carte pricing is often a losing proposition once time and consumables are counted. Recurring membership models perform better.
- Target 50 to 60% gross margin. Treat anything meaningfully below that as a signal to revisit pricing or services.
- Vet capital partners carefully. Equity given up for promised future payment is a real risk, not a guarantee.
- Growth is still overwhelmingly word-of-mouth. Invest in outcomes and community relationships over paid acquisition.
Beyond the Scale
In a fireside conversation with Dr. David Luu, Noom co-founder Saeju Jeong traced 19 years of a company that had to reinvent itself repeatedly to survive: starting as a failed Peloton-style hardware bike, pivoting into a top-five global health app by 2010, and then absorbing a 20%, then another 30%, revenue hit the moment GLP-1s displaced weight loss as the internet's most searched health term.
People do not want to be taught. Saeju Jeong, Co-Founder, Noom
Jeong's core argument for physicians building a practice today: trust compounds into brand, and brand becomes equity that's genuinely hard for a competitor to copy. A real patient case will always outperform a misleading clip on TikTok or Instagram. Counterintuitively, he warned against over-testing and biomarker overload as a sales tactic, since it tends to scare patients off rather than build confidence. Small, believable wins move people, not information dumps, and Noom's own approach leans on what the team calls being "ultra kind" rather than clinical. Weight-loss motivation, in Noom's data, is driven far more by fear than by vanity.
Jeong framed longevity itself as an "affordable luxury," now the largest healthcare investment category behind AI, pointing to Noom's own expansion, including a new at-home biomarker testing kit bringing lab-grade cardiovascular, metabolic, and hormone panels directly into a consumer's living room, with results delivered inside a week, as evidence of where consumer demand is already headed.
Our Key Takeaways from Beyond the Scale
- Trust compounds into brand equity. That equity is durable and hard for competitors to copy quickly.
- Real patient outcomes outperform polished social content every time. Let your cases do the marketing.
- Resist the urge to overwhelm patients with data. Small, believable wins build more adherence than exhaustive biomarker dumps.
- Weight-loss and health motivation is driven more by fear than by vanity. Message accordingly, with empathy over alarm.
- Consumer demand for accessible, at-home diagnostics is accelerating. Longevity is increasingly positioned as an affordable, not exclusive, category.
Doctors in the Followers Era
The closing business session put four physicians, Dr. Jessica Shepherd (Hims & Hers), Dr. Guénolé Addor, Dr. Thomas Paloschi (Dr.Longevity), and Dr. Pooja Gidwani, in direct conversation about building authority in public without trading away medical credibility to do it.
Their shared formula for a durable brand: relevance, relatability, evidence-based information, authenticity, expertise, and warmth, in that order of difficulty. Several admitted to real imposter syndrome before posting their first piece of content.
Be yourself. Film on your phone. From the Doctors in the Followers Era panel, on getting started
Consistency, not production value, is what the algorithm and the audience both reward, closer to academia's "publish or perish" than to traditional marketing.
All medical doctors should become an influencer, because influencers are becoming doctors. From the Doctors in the Followers Era panel
Their practical playbook: turn real patient questions into content (a "how to read your CBC" breakdown was one example raised), keep a small circle of honest beta readers before anything goes public, and separate personal, practice, and community brands so each can grow on its own terms. On monetization, the panel pointed to a familiar structure: give real value away at the top of the funnel to build trust, then convert into a paid tier, while staying deliberate about where the personal-patient boundary sits online.
Our Key Takeaways from Doctors in the Followers Era
- A durable physician brand is built on relevance, relatability, evidence, authenticity, expertise, and warmth, roughly in that order.
- Imposter syndrome is nearly universal at the start. The advice that works: start small, film on your phone, and ignore the like count.
- Consistency beats production value. Near-daily posting matters more to growth than polish.
- Turn real patient questions into content. Your actual practice is your best content pipeline.
- Separate your personal, practice, and community brands so each can be managed and monetized on its own terms.
- Give value away at the top of the funnel to build trust, then convert into a paid offering.
What Ties It Together
None of these six sessions were about the biology of aging. They were about the infrastructure underneath it: the org chart, the P&L, the team, and the reputation that make a longevity practice survivable past year one. That infrastructure is exactly what the longevitydocs™ longevity medicine community, and the Certified longevitydocs™ (CLD) longevity medicine certification course, exist to provide: a Practice Leadership curriculum module built around real business architecture, priority access to the longevitydocs™ Global Directory connecting physicians to referral partners and vetted collaborators, private peer chat with the community inside the longevitydocs.ai platform, and direct connection to 1,200+ vetted longevity physicians across 68+ countries, from New York and Miami to London and Paris, who are actively solving the same problems raised on stage in Cannes.
As Dr. Luu put it during the summit's opening keynote, physicians building in this space are the guardians of where this field goes next, and the way the community builds it now is the legacy it leaves behind. For the physician stories behind the credential itself, including how Dr. Ken Winnard, Dr. Angela Contreras, Dr. Johan Hedevåg, and Dr. Naishon Arafi each used the CLD to grow their own practices, read The ROI of the CLD.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Chief Longevity Officer?
An emerging executive role, discussed at Cannes 2026, blending clinical leadership, marketing, and patient experience to guide a healthcare organization's longevity medicine strategy. It's still being defined in real time by physicians like Dr. Dawn Mussallem, Dr. Sunita Mishra, Dr. Vikas Mehta, and Dr. Saranya Wyles.
What is the Certified longevitydocs.™ (CLD) course?
A physician-only longevity medicine certification course: 100+ hours across 10 modules, self-paced over 6 to 9 months, covering geroscience, diagnostics, therapeutics, technology, ethics, and practice leadership. Learn more about the CLD.
Who spoke at longevitydocs.™ Cannes Summit 2026 ?
Dr. Dawn Mussallem, Dr. Sunita Mishra, Dr. Vikas Mehta, Dr. Saranya Wyles, Dr. Jila Senemar, Dr. Ken Winnard, Dr. Amanda Kahn, Dr. Jonathann Kuo, Dr. Mohit Joshipura, Dr. Melissa Loseke, Dr. Felix Olale, Dr. Jijoe Joseph, Dr. Jessica Shepherd, Dr. Guénolé Addor, Dr. Thomas Paloschi, Dr. Pooja Gidwani, Saad Alam, Ali Watson, Saeju Jeong, and Dr. David Luu.
How much does the CLD longevity medicine certification cost?
$10,000 USD per physician, covering the full curriculum, clinical protocols, business architecture training, and access to the longevitydocs physician network.
How many physicians are in the longevitydocs community?
1,200+ vetted longevity physicians across 68+ countries, including major hubs in New York, Toronto, Miami, London, Paris, and Los Angeles.
What is the most important metric for scaling a longevity medicine practice?
Patient retention, not top-line revenue. Physicians at Cannes 2026 consistently pointed to recurring membership models over one-time or a la carte transactions as the number that determines whether a practice survives and scales.
Read next: The ROI of the CLD · The World's First Longevity Medicine Certification· 10 Learnings from longevitydocs Cannes
The Business of Longevity Medicine: How Cannes 2026 Mapped the Playbook for Scale
The Business of Longevity Medicine: How Cannes 2026 Mapped the Playbook for Scale
Six sessions. Two days. One throughline. Beneath the science of Cannes 2026 ran a harder question: what does it actually take to build a longevity practice that survives past the excitement? A new C-suite role no one has fully defined yet. Founders who left secure careers and got the first year wrong before they got it right. The unit economics almost no physician is trained to track. And the uncomfortable truth that your reputation is now part of your business model. Here's what the physicians and operators building this field right now had to say.
Longevitydocs Cannes 2026 opened at the Palais des Festivals with Dr. David Luu welcoming 200 physicians from 30 countries into what he framed not as a conference, but as peers connecting to build a discipline that "is not a specialty yet." Across the two days that followed, the clinical sessions on geroscience, AI, and diagnostics ran alongside a parallel conversation that mattered just as much: how do you actually build this into a practice that lasts?
Six sessions carried that thread from open to close. Together, they form something close to a business playbook for longevity medicine, told through the physicians and operators who are living it.
Longevitydocs.™ Cannes Summit & Awards 2026, Palais des Festivals
The Chief Longevity Officer Steps In
The first session tackled a role that, as moderator Saad Alam (CEO, Hone Health) put it, barely exists yet. Alam's own company runs roughly 300 physicians across 40 states with nine-figure revenue doubling year over year, and even Hone hasn't filled its Chief Medical Officer seat in three years, because the skill set the role demands keeps shifting month to month.
Dr. Dawn Mussallem, who left Mayo Clinic after 25 years to become CMO of Fountain Life, reframed the job's north star entirely: away from disease management and toward elevating the human experience, answering to the patient rather than to a diagnosis.
Dr. Sunita Mishra of Neko Health (founded by Spotify's founder) described the role as fundamentally translational: decoding science for consumers and carrying clinical judgment back into the business, fluent in both worlds at once.
Dr. Vikas Mehta, who runs Cedars-Sinai's international concierge network across Mexico City, London, Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh, put a finer point on it: today's Chief Medical Officer is quietly also the Chief Marketing Officer, doing real demand generation. Dr. Saranya Wyles of Mayo Clinic, who runs the SALUD longevity registry tracking 100 patients across five years and 40+ biomarkers, grounded the panel back in governance: IRB oversight over everything, pilots tested in 30, 60, and 90 day windows, only FDA-regulated peptides.
The consensus: this executive role is nascent, hybrid across medicine, marketing, and legal, and being pulled into existence by patient demand faster than any institution can formally define it.
Our Key Takeaways from The Chief Longevity Officer Steps In
Longevity Founders Mode
Four physicians who left thriving, secure practices to build their own longevity clinics traded the wins and the scars. Dr. Jila Senemar had delivered 5,500 babies. Dr. Jonathann Kuo was running roughly 100 spinal and joint injections a day. Dr. Ken Winnard was seeing 25 to 40 patients daily with his hands tied on the preventive labs he actually wanted to order. All of them left because, as the panel put it, the old model only ever "slapped bandages" on problems that needed prevention.
The first-year trap nearly every founder on stage admitted to: under-investing in infrastructure while over-investing in themselves. Dr. Amanda Kahn ran her own front desk, her own scheduling, and her own lab draws, and didn't bill a single patient for the first six months because, in her words, she "didn't want to deal with billing."
Local resistance was real before it became referrals. Physicians in their communities dismissed their HRT, GLP-1, and nutrition-first protocols as "snake oil," until those same doctors started sending their own patients and family members once they saw outcomes. What changed the trajectory, across all four founders, was treating team-building as a first-year priority rather than an afterthought.
Kuo now runs roughly 75 employees across three practices, built in part through a year-long mini-residency model: morning grand rounds, end-of-day wrap-ups, that keeps care consistent before new associates are given full autonomy. And notably, these founders don't treat each other as competition. They refer patients across state lines routinely.
Their endgames diverge. Kahn is staying intentionally solo and small, Kuo is building a sellable brand, and Senemar is scaling an online education platform. Not one of them said they'd go back to their old job.
Our Key Takeaways from Longevity Founders Mode
Build Your Longevity Practice with Dr. Melissa Loseke, Dr. Mohit Joshipura, and Ali Watson
Where the founders panel was personal, this session was structural: a practitioner-founder trio comparing brick-and-mortar, digital, and hybrid models at very different scales. Dr. Melissa Loseke runs a brick-and-mortar clinic in Omaha alongside telehealth. Dr. Mohit Joshipura is CMO of OpenLoop, a B2B telemedicine platform operating across all 50 states with over 200,000 patients a month and 750+ NCQA-accredited providers. Ali Watson runs a family-office network of roughly 60 physical concierge clinics plus a 50-state telehealth arm, and has personally advised over 100 physician founders.
Their shared finding: modality, digital versus physical, matters far less than clarity of identity, of goals, and of what you will not compromise on.
Competing on price, the panel warned, invites doctor-shopping and erodes margin. Lower-priced patients are better routed to junior physicians on the team than used to compete on rate. The metric that actually matters to anyone buying or investing in a practice is retention, not top-line revenue. Recurring relationships beat one-time transactions every time, reinforced through annual and monthly programs, year-end reports, and proactive pre-renewal outreach. Wraparound care drives that retention: OpenLoop, for instance, pairs GLP-1 prescribing with coaching, behavioral health, and dietetics rather than letting the drug stand alone. Watson described the underlying principle for scaling virtually as building "airtight" quality systems, so clinical quality grows in step with patient volume instead of falling behind it.
Recruitment, not patient acquisition, was named the hardest operational problem in the room. Generic staffing agencies simply don't understand longevity medicine, so community and word of mouth carry the weight instead. OpenLoop's own culture, Joshipura noted, is built around "failing fast" rather than waiting for certainty. And every founder, whichever exit path they're planning (never selling, junior partner succession, private equity, or a capital raise), agreed that whoever eventually buys in will scrutinize retention before anything else.
Our Key Takeaways from Build Your Longevity Practice
Know Your Numbers: Dr. Felix Olale (TPG) and Dr. Jijoe Joseph
This workshop was the most quietly uncomfortable session of the summit. Dr. Felix Olale (TPG) and Dr. Jijoe Joseph (Aesura Health) opened by polling the room: only about 10% of attendees could name their own practice's LTV to CAC ratio. Fewer still tracked ARPM, cost of goods, or gross margin at all.
Their case study was blunt: marketing spend that started at $25,000 a month (since brought down to $15,000) drove customer acquisition cost to roughly $300 per patient, while lifetime value started near $50, meaning the practice lost money on every patient for the first six months, before eventually climbing to around $5,000 per patient.
The single most common first-year mistake, in their experience, is building an entire treatment vertical at once. One practice sank roughly $500,000 into equipment: cryotherapy that ended up serving only eight patients, plasma exchange, red light, hyperbaric, all financed as fixed overhead before any of it proved out. Their advice was to layer services one at a time and run the ROI on each machine before adding the next.
A la carte offerings, the panel argued, are structurally a losing proposition once you account for consult time, consumables, and follow-up against the margin on a single service. Recurring membership is what actually turns a practice into an annuity instead of a transaction. Their tiered pricing example, memberships at $9.99 and $19.99 a month, with everything else billed in clean time blocks, got the practice to cash-flow-positive at around 30% gross margin, with 50 to 60% as the real target.
Capital raised a warning flag of its own: one practice gave up 70% equity to a private equity partner for a promised 30% perpetuity payment that never arrived. Growth, they argued, comes from acquisition that's still 70 to 80% word-of-mouth, and from scaling through tiers and junior providers rather than trying to clone the founding physician.
Our Key Takeaways from Know Your Numbers
Beyond the Scale
In a fireside conversation with Dr. David Luu, Noom co-founder Saeju Jeong traced 19 years of a company that had to reinvent itself repeatedly to survive: starting as a failed Peloton-style hardware bike, pivoting into a top-five global health app by 2010, and then absorbing a 20%, then another 30%, revenue hit the moment GLP-1s displaced weight loss as the internet's most searched health term.
Jeong's core argument for physicians building a practice today: trust compounds into brand, and brand becomes equity that's genuinely hard for a competitor to copy. A real patient case will always outperform a misleading clip on TikTok or Instagram. Counterintuitively, he warned against over-testing and biomarker overload as a sales tactic, since it tends to scare patients off rather than build confidence. Small, believable wins move people, not information dumps, and Noom's own approach leans on what the team calls being "ultra kind" rather than clinical. Weight-loss motivation, in Noom's data, is driven far more by fear than by vanity.
Jeong framed longevity itself as an "affordable luxury," now the largest healthcare investment category behind AI, pointing to Noom's own expansion, including a new at-home biomarker testing kit bringing lab-grade cardiovascular, metabolic, and hormone panels directly into a consumer's living room, with results delivered inside a week, as evidence of where consumer demand is already headed.
Our Key Takeaways from Beyond the Scale
Doctors in the Followers Era
The closing business session put four physicians, Dr. Jessica Shepherd (Hims & Hers), Dr. Guénolé Addor, Dr. Thomas Paloschi (Dr.Longevity), and Dr. Pooja Gidwani, in direct conversation about building authority in public without trading away medical credibility to do it.
Their shared formula for a durable brand: relevance, relatability, evidence-based information, authenticity, expertise, and warmth, in that order of difficulty. Several admitted to real imposter syndrome before posting their first piece of content.
Consistency, not production value, is what the algorithm and the audience both reward, closer to academia's "publish or perish" than to traditional marketing.
Their practical playbook: turn real patient questions into content (a "how to read your CBC" breakdown was one example raised), keep a small circle of honest beta readers before anything goes public, and separate personal, practice, and community brands so each can grow on its own terms. On monetization, the panel pointed to a familiar structure: give real value away at the top of the funnel to build trust, then convert into a paid tier, while staying deliberate about where the personal-patient boundary sits online.
Our Key Takeaways from Doctors in the Followers Era
What Ties It Together
None of these six sessions were about the biology of aging. They were about the infrastructure underneath it: the org chart, the P&L, the team, and the reputation that make a longevity practice survivable past year one. That infrastructure is exactly what the longevitydocs™ longevity medicine community, and the Certified longevitydocs™ (CLD) longevity medicine certification course, exist to provide: a Practice Leadership curriculum module built around real business architecture, priority access to the longevitydocs™ Global Directory connecting physicians to referral partners and vetted collaborators, private peer chat with the community inside the longevitydocs.ai platform, and direct connection to 1,200+ vetted longevity physicians across 68+ countries, from New York and Miami to London and Paris, who are actively solving the same problems raised on stage in Cannes.
As Dr. Luu put it during the summit's opening keynote, physicians building in this space are the guardians of where this field goes next, and the way the community builds it now is the legacy it leaves behind. For the physician stories behind the credential itself, including how Dr. Ken Winnard, Dr. Angela Contreras, Dr. Johan Hedevåg, and Dr. Naishon Arafi each used the CLD to grow their own practices, read The ROI of the CLD.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Chief Longevity Officer?
An emerging executive role, discussed at Cannes 2026, blending clinical leadership, marketing, and patient experience to guide a healthcare organization's longevity medicine strategy. It's still being defined in real time by physicians like Dr. Dawn Mussallem, Dr. Sunita Mishra, Dr. Vikas Mehta, and Dr. Saranya Wyles.
What is the Certified longevitydocs.™ (CLD) course?
A physician-only longevity medicine certification course: 100+ hours across 10 modules, self-paced over 6 to 9 months, covering geroscience, diagnostics, therapeutics, technology, ethics, and practice leadership. Learn more about the CLD.
Who spoke at longevitydocs.™ Cannes Summit 2026 ?
Dr. Dawn Mussallem, Dr. Sunita Mishra, Dr. Vikas Mehta, Dr. Saranya Wyles, Dr. Jila Senemar, Dr. Ken Winnard, Dr. Amanda Kahn, Dr. Jonathann Kuo, Dr. Mohit Joshipura, Dr. Melissa Loseke, Dr. Felix Olale, Dr. Jijoe Joseph, Dr. Jessica Shepherd, Dr. Guénolé Addor, Dr. Thomas Paloschi, Dr. Pooja Gidwani, Saad Alam, Ali Watson, Saeju Jeong, and Dr. David Luu.
How much does the CLD longevity medicine certification cost?
$10,000 USD per physician, covering the full curriculum, clinical protocols, business architecture training, and access to the longevitydocs physician network.
How many physicians are in the longevitydocs community?
1,200+ vetted longevity physicians across 68+ countries, including major hubs in New York, Toronto, Miami, London, Paris, and Los Angeles.
What is the most important metric for scaling a longevity medicine practice?
Patient retention, not top-line revenue. Physicians at Cannes 2026 consistently pointed to recurring membership models over one-time or a la carte transactions as the number that determines whether a practice survives and scales.
Read next: The ROI of the CLD · The World's First Longevity Medicine Certification· 10 Learnings from longevitydocs Cannes
Building a Longevity Medicine Practice? Certification Is a Must.
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