Longevity.Technology CEO shares his outlook for longevity investing, exploring longevity domains and categories and the clinical stages of longevity biotechs.
Last year, I was invited to share my outlook on the longevity investment landscape at a key summit in Berlin. The Rejuvenation Startup Summit brings together startups, members of the longevity venture capital / investor ecosystem, and researchers interested in founding or joining a startup – all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan.
The Summit may be a few months behind us now, having occurred in October 2022, but the influence of this important meeting continues.
In fact, only earlier this week, we published news about Cellvie closing $5.5 million to accelerate development of Therapeutic Mitochondria Transplantation, and the team at Cyclarity continue to accelerate progress of their novel cyclodextrin therapy for atherosclerosis.
The Rejuvenation Startup Summit was a high-energy meeting, attracting many of the key players from across the world to Berlin – and it was my honour to be a keynote speaker.
Having a full 30 mins to riff our definitive definition of longevity, the scale of investment and my own personal longevity journey was great fun, and the audience was marvellous. My thanks to Michael Greve and Frank Schueler of the Forever Healthy Foundation for organising a wonderful event, and I am sure I am not alone in already looking forward to this year’s event!
My thoughts on…
N=universal
All of us have experienced diseases of aging, whether that’s our parents, our grandparents, or even in ourselves. We see that aging is something that really needs to be defined in the context of longevity as an industry.
If you can start to count things, you can measure the industry – you can then start to measure how it’s tracking and how it’s improving. We can look at longevity determinants and diseases of aging, but sitting in the middle of those are the aging drivers; organisations that are focused on aging drivers are the companies that are making up the longevity economy.
Switching up the paradigm
We have a lot of education to do; especially around the paradigm of fixing one disease at a time, rather than attending your business, finances and investment onto actually fixing aging – this is the definition of what we are trying to do as an industry.
The key thing is to prevent those diseases of aging in the first place – if we can do that, then we’re extending life. But, likewise, looking at renewal, whether that’s renewing cellular structures, or renewing tissue, or maybe even our cognitive functions, drivers play a key role, and diagnostics sit under it all.
Looking at the longevity industry
What’s happening in the industry is impressive. 2021 topped out at $7.3 billion cumulative investment on longevity companies – and that was twice 2020. That’s not just because the number of companies changed, it’s the amount of capital that’s gone into the industry. 2021 was obviously affected by COVID and there was a biotech correction in the marketplace which a lot of us are still dealing with.
2022 remains a big year, partly due to Altos, and we can see a lot of activity happening and new interest; we think that company formations swill still continue, and we expect 2022 to beat 2021, although not doubling it due to the existing market factors.
Aging is plastic – we all know that. It is possible to move it around, and that’s an interesting concept that not all people understand, yet. Longevity has gone from a movement to an industry and it’s a really exciting opportunity.
