Inside the assumptions and interactive model behind our $617b longevity biotech TAM – and why you need not agree with us.
With thanks to MuseCell Innovations, sponsor of the Longevity Biotech Report.
Put $617 billion on a market forecast and it has a habit of becoming the story. However, in our new Longevity Biotech Report, which was released yesterday, the more interesting question is not the size of the number but how we arrived at it – and what happens when the assumptions beneath it change.
Our $617b estimate is a target addressable market (TAM): a top-down model of the annual global revenue a future gerotherapeutics market could generate by 2045. It is conditional, not a valuation of the longevity companies and therapeutics that exist today. That distinction matters. The model asks what might happen if approved interventions targeting the biology of aging become available, and builds an answer from assumptions about eligibility, pricing, adoption and timing.
Longevity.Technology: A TAM calculation can acquire the authority of fact remarkably quickly once a sufficiently large dollar sign is placed in front of it. We would rather show our working. The $617 billion figure is an argument about what a future gerotherapeutics market could look like, not a prophecy about what it inevitably will; underneath it sit assumptions about who receives these therapies, when they receive them, what they cost, how quickly they are adopted and when the regulatory starting gun is fired. We have our answers to those questions, but the more interesting exercise is not insisting that everyone shares them.
The TAM Explorer puts those assumptions into the reader’s hands: dial down uptake, push approval further out, change the eligible population or choose another pricing model and $617 billion duly disappears, replaced by your number. Forecasting a market that does not yet exist inevitably involves uncertainty; making that uncertainty adjustable turns a headline prediction into something people can test.
What sits beneath $617b
The default model begins with a global market, but does not simply multiply the world’s eligible population by US drug prices. It incorporates regional price erosion to reflect the substantial differences in pharmaceutical pricing between the US and other markets.
Eligibility begins at 45 – a deliberately preventive scenario in which gerotherapeutics are administered before significant age-related morbidity, rather than reserved for older patients who already have disease. The Explorer also allows later starting ages, including over-60 and over-75 populations.
For price, we use GLP-1 therapies as the closest current analogue for a scalable intervention, at approximately $6,000 per patient per year. Alternatives range from cheaper, statin-like economics to considerably more expensive one-time cell and gene therapies.
Then comes uptake. Our default is 35% of the eligible population, reached over a ten-year diffusion curve; the report compares that assumption with adoption of mass-market preventives such as statins and newer GLP-1 therapies. Finally, the clock begins with the first approved gerotherapeutic in 2035 – another assumption examined separately in the report rather than treated as a certainty.
Change any of these and the market changes with it. That is rather the point.
Two numbers, two questions
The $617b figure should not be confused with another headline number in the report: $230b.
That estimate comes from the opposite direction. Using our DLT intelligence platform, we individually valued 3,036 therapeutic assets across 781 tracked companies, applying clinical-stage probability and comparable-drug sales data to estimate potential annual revenue through existing disease approval pathways. The methodology includes finite-market caps and removes duplicate molecule entries to guard against inflating the aggregate value.
So $617b is top-down and conditional; $230b is bottom-up and asset-based. One describes the potential market if a new gerotherapeutic category emerges, while the other asks what the pipeline we can see today could generate within regulatory pathways that already exist. They are deliberately separate calculations.
Your turn at the controls
Market forecasts are often presented as finished objects, their assumptions tucked somewhere considerably less prominent than their conclusions. We wanted ours to remain open.
The Longevity Biotech TAM Explorer therefore allows users to alter the variables themselves – testing different populations, prices, uptake rates and timelines, whether their view of the emerging market is more cautious than ours or considerably more ambitious.
“The $617b figure is our view of where this market could go, based on assumptions we’re happy to put in plain sight,” says Phil Newman, founder and CEO of Longevity.Technology and also an author on the new report. “Rather than asking people to take our word for it, we’ve opened up the model – play with the variables, challenge our thinking and build your own view of what the longevity biotech market could be worth.”
The $617b is our baseline. It need not be yours.
A model made to be challenged
No model can remove the uncertainty inherent in forecasting a therapeutic category almost two decades into the future. It can, however, make that uncertainty visible – and give other people the means to interrogate it.
Perhaps the useful number, then, is not simply $617b. It is whatever the evidence, assumptions and a little judicious slider-moving persuade you the market could become.
Explore the model and build your own TAM HERE. Plus, the full Longevity Biotech Report – assets, models and all – is FREE to download here.
