I spent years as an elite ultra-endurance athlete pushing my body to its absolute limits. I thought I understood health. But it wasn't until I started digging into the science of what actually drives how we age — and why some people seem to do it so much better than others — that I realised we've been looking in the wrong place.

We talk a lot about longevity these days. NAD+, mitochondria, telomeres, senolytics — there's an entire industry built around these concepts. And they matter. But there's a system that sits upstream of all of them, quietly regulating nearly every process in your body, and that most longevity protocols barely mention.

Your immune system.

Not your immune system in the sense of "not getting colds." Your immune system as a sophisticated regulatory network that controls inflammation, cellular repair, barrier function, and the internal environment every single cell in your body operates in. When it works well, everything works better. When it starts to decline — and it does, with age — the effects ripple into every corner of your biology.

THE AGEING IMMUNE SYSTEM: WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING

Scientists have a term for the age-related decline of immune function: immunosenescence. It's a mouthful, but the concept is straightforward. As we age, both our adaptive immunity (the part that learns and remembers threats) and our innate immunity (the rapid-response first line of defence) gradually deteriorate. Our Natural Killer cells — the ones that surveil for cancer and virus-infected cells — become less active. Our T-cells become exhausted and less responsive. Our regulatory systems lose their precision.

And alongside this decline, something else happens: inflammageing. This is the chronic, low-grade background inflammation that accumulates over decades. Not the acute inflammation of an injury or infection — that's actually healthy and necessary. This is a persistent, smouldering activation of the inflammatory system that never fully resolves. It's driven by the ageing immune system's dysfunction, and it's now linked to virtually every major age-related condition: heart disease, neurodegeneration, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and more.

"It's not just that your immune system gets weaker as you age. It's that it gets dysregulated — it starts doing the wrong things, in the wrong places, at the wrong times."

Here's where it gets really interesting for anyone interested in longevity science. That chronic background inflammation doesn't just feel bad. It directly interferes with the cellular systems that most longevity supplements target.

Take NAD+ — the molecule that powers mitochondria and activates sirtuins (your longevity genes). Inflammageing upregulates an enzyme called CD38, which is one of the primary consumers of NAD+ in your body. In other words: chronic immune dysfunction is actively depleting the very molecule most longevity protocols try to restore. If you're supplementing NAD+ precursors into a high-inflammation environment, you're filling a bucket with a significant hole in it.

THE GUT CONNECTION MOST PEOPLE MISS

There's another piece of this that I think is profoundly underappreciated: the role of your gut barrier in all of this.

Seventy percent of your immune cells live in your gut — in the gut-associated lymphoid tissue. Your intestinal lining is not just a digestive organ; it's a dynamic immune interface. When that barrier becomes compromised — and it does, through stress, poor diet, medications, and age — bacterial fragments can leak into systemic circulation. Your immune system mounts a response to these, and that response never fully stops. You've now created a continuous driver of systemic inflammageing from the inside.

This is why gut health is not separate from immune health, and why it's not separate from longevity. They're the same system.

THE INFLAMMAGEING LOOP

Immune dysfunction leads to chronic inflammatory cytokines (IL-6, TNF-alpha, NF-kB), which drive CD38 upregulation, which depletes NAD+, which causes mitochondrial dysfunction and impaired cellular energy, which leads to further immune dysfunction — and the loop continues.

Breaking this loop requires addressing the immune system first — not last.

WHY WE BUILT RE:JUVENATE PRO

When Peter Lehrke and I were developing the Aevum Labs formula, we kept coming back to the same question: if we want to support true biological longevity — not just add years, but genuinely slow the processes that drive decline — where do we actually start?

The answer, consistently, was the immune system. Before we think about energy. Before we think about epigenetics. Before we think about autophagy. If the inflammatory environment isn't addressed first, everything else is less effective.

Re:juvenate Pro is built around four ingredients that work together to address immunosenescence from multiple angles simultaneously.

IDP® — Immune Defense Protein

A proprietary whey protein extract containing lactoferrin, lactoperoxidase, immunoglobulins, and 48 additional bioactive proteins. It activates Natural Killer cells, strengthens body barriers — gut, lung, brain, skin — and supports mucosal immunity. It's the only ingredient in this category backed by a double-blind RCT showing improved immune response to the influenza vaccine, which is a validated clinical measure of immunosenescence.

Immunel® — Colostrum Extract

A patented bovine colostrum whey extract that rapidly activates NK cells and macrophages — within hours of taking it. It works through different receptors than IDP®, so the two complement rather than duplicate each other. It supports immune surveillance in the gut and helps maintain the balance between immune activation and tolerance.

Carnosic Acid — Rosemary Extract

One of the most potent natural activators of a pathway called Nrf2 — the master switch for your body's own antioxidant and cellular defence systems. When Nrf2 is activated, it switches on hundreds of protective genes. Carnosic acid also directly inhibits NF-kB (a key inflammatory driver) and reduces CXCL9, a chemokine specifically linked to immune ageing and T-cell exhaustion.

Kawakawa — Piper excelsum

A taonga plant endemic to New Zealand, used in Maori traditional medicine for centuries for its anti-inflammatory and gut-calming properties. Modern research has confirmed its ability to modulate inflammatory cytokines in macrophages, support gastrointestinal immune function, and reduce oxidative stress. We're proud to include this extraordinary NZ botanical.

Together, these four ingredients measurably reduce the inflammatory cytokines that drive immunosenescence — IL-6, TNF-alpha, NF-kB, IL-1B, hs-CRP, and CXCL9 — while increasing IL-10, the anti-inflammatory master regulator. It's bidirectional immune modulation, not a blunt immune "boost."

THIS IS PHASE 1. HERE'S WHY THAT MATTERS.

Re:juvenate Pro sits at the foundation of what we call the Aevum Stack — a three-phase approach to longevity that mirrors the biological hierarchy of ageing itself.

Phase 1 — Foundation: Re:juvenate Pro (immune modulation and barrier integrity)

Phase 2 — Engine: NAD+ Next Gen (cellular energy and epigenetic repair) — coming soon

Phase 3 — Cleanup: Autophagy Protocol (coming 2026)

Phase 2 — NAD+ Next Gen — restores the cellular energy and epigenetic repair capacity that every cell depends on. But it works better in a lower-inflammation environment. When you reduce the chronic inflammatory signals first, NAD+ restoration can actually reach the mitochondria and sirtuins that need it, rather than being consumed by immune effector cells.

Phase 3 (coming in 2026) will target autophagy — the cellular self-cleaning process. This too is energy-intensive, and it works best when the energetic infrastructure from Phase 2 is in place.

We're not just selling products. We're building a protocol that reflects how biology actually works.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

If you're interested in ageing well — not just living longer, but feeling genuinely vital, cognitively sharp, and physically capable as you get older — I'd encourage you to think about your immune system not as a system that fights off colds, but as the regulatory hub of your entire biology.

The research increasingly supports a simple idea: address the immune microenvironment first, and everything else becomes more effective. That's the principle we built Re:juvenate Pro on.

One capsule a day. Four clinically researched ingredients. A foundation that works.

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THIS ARTICLE

The formulation of Re:juvenate Pro was developed with our scientific advisory team, including Dr. Elizabeth Yurth from the Boulder Longevity Institute. The research supporting each ingredient — including peer-reviewed studies on IDP®, Immunel®, carnosic acid, and kawakawa — is available on the Aevum Labs science page. We believe in full transparency about why every ingredient is in this formula.

Visit to learn more or shop Re:juvenate Pro.