Hevolution Healthspan Strategy: A Leadership Interview
In November 2025, we found ourselves back in Saudi Arabia’s capital, this time not to plan or build, but to reflect. Nearly ten months after KlarCX’s Creative Experience Director, Thana, wrapped her 18 months of editorial work with Hevolution, — detailed in our previous impact story on fostering healthspan through storytelling — Manal, our co-founder, sat down with the foundation’s Chief Communications and Marketing Officer, Michael Torres, at their offices in Riyadh’s KAFD for a behind-the-scenes look at their strategic, and at times counterintuitive, approach to shaping the healthspan landscape.
Manal Assaad with Michael Torres at Hevolution’s offices in Riyadh.
As they watched the city bustling outside the window, the conversation turned away from tactical checklists and toward something more existential.
“How do you change minds and behaviors around something people can’t see, feel, or benefit from yet?” Michael asked.
This question sits at the heart of the challenge facing healthspan — the science of extending healthy, disease-free years. Unlike most healthcare breakthroughs, healthspan offers no instant gratification or viral before-and-after. To tackle this, Michael and Hevolution have leaned into a framework of five principles for influencing complex systems such as healthcare.
1. Prioritize the Few Who Unlock Systemic Change
Michael is clear that Hevolution’s strategy intentionally flips conventional thinking. Rather than launching broad public awareness campaigns, the foundation adopts a B2B and B2G first approach.
The hard-to-reach audiences they target are policymakers, venture capitalists, and biotech CEOs. These decision-makers already grasp what is at stake. By focusing on those who can shape fields and fund research, Hevolution aligns the system from the top down before attempting to reach the general public. This stealth mode allowed them to coordinate a powerful narrative and build credibility before their first major convening at the Global Healthspan Summit in 2023.
2. Communicate Relentlessly across Channels, Building Habit and Muscle Memory for Ideas
During the conversation, Michael drew a parallel that grounded the entire strategy: the history of public safety campaigns like seatbelt use or anti-littering. These succeeded not through a single ad, but through multi-channel, repetitive messaging until the behaviour became “muscle memory”.
However, Michael notes that healthspan is a much harder sell because its benefits are delayed by decades. “Prevention feels abstract,” he explained, noting that most healthcare systems are designed to be reactive rather than proactive. To bridge this gap, he emphasises that changing a system requires “patience, persistence, and precision” to convince people to act on an experience they haven’t had yet.
3. Differentiate your Message from the Noise. Credibility Matters more than Volume.
In a world of social media “biohackers” and extreme longevity influencers, Michael is adamant about distancing Hevolution from the noise. He stresses that healthspan must be clearly differentiated from popular “longevity” narratives.
For Hevolution, it isn’t about simply living longer; it is about extending disease-free years. Michael highlights that popular narratives often risk making aging research seem elitist or oversimplified. By sticking to evidence-based, biologically grounded science, Hevolution ensures that its “non-negotiable” pillars remain scientific legitimacy and precision.
4. Frame Aging as an Economic and National Strategy
Michael points to the leadership of CEO Dr. Mehmood Khan in framing aging biology as a “triple threat”: a scientific, societal, and economic issue. Hevolution’s message to the world is that healthspan is a national economic strategy, not just a health initiative.
This is particularly sensible in Saudi Arabia, where 50% of the population is under 30 and noncommunicable diseases are rising. Michael explains that by framing the issue around the soaring costs of healthcare after age 60 and the declining global birth rates, they can secure the necessary buy-in from policymakers who might otherwise see aging as a niche scientific concern.
5. Measure Success by Influence and Alignment
Perhaps the most striking part of the conversation was how Michael defines success. Hevolution views its role as “catalytic”—it exists to normalise aging biology as a mainstream science, much like how cancer research was transformed over the last fifty years.
Because of this, their metrics aren’t about clicks or impressions, but about the growth in global funding and collaboration. Michael concluded our talk by sharing the success metric of Hevolution’s CEO, Dr. Mehmood Khan, that is intentionally counterintuitive:
“If we’re the largest funder today but the smallest in five years because others joined the space, we have succeeded.”
— Dr. Mehmood Khan, Chief Executive Officer at Hevolution
By reaching the hard-to-reach decision-makers today, Michael and his team are ensuring that the consequences of getting this right—which are “real, urgent, and enormous”—benefit the world tomorrow.
Looking ahead
While healthspan may remain invisible to individuals for now, the work unfolding at Hevolution is deeply personal to those building the field. Since concluding her time with the foundation, Thana has continued exploring the intersection of healthcare, AI, and behavioral science, supporting organizations in designing communication strategies that are purposeful, science-led, and built for the future.
At KlarCX, we continue to support transformations where narrative, science, and strategy intersect. Get in touch if you are looking to shape influence at the system level.
