Aging is a fact of life… or is it?

Hoping to uncover the secret to living forever, Silicon Valley immortalists have experimented with everything from young blood transfusions to gene injections.

Meanwhile, breakthrough studies have demonstrated age reversal or even tissue regeneration in animals like mice.

But can we crack the code for humans?

Living Longer

One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, the average human life expectancy has more than doubled in the past hundred years.

With widespread medical advancements and the rise of health-tracking tech, many children born in a wealthy country are likely to live into their ninth decade and beyond.

While that’s reason to celebrate, this reality presents a new problem for humanity. The world’s centenarian population is projected to 8x by 2050, and addressing aging is a rising priority.

• On average, families spend up to $140,000 to care for elderly adults with long-term care needs.
• Driven by aging baby boomers, studies predict that by 2029, the federal government will spend half its budget on those aged 65 and older.
• 55M people across the world have dementia, costing the world $1.3T a year, and experts project a 40% spike in patients by 2030.

As we live longer, a growing market demands a solution to costly age-related health problems.

Disrupting Death

Hoping to cash in (and live long enough to spend it), longevity scientists and entrepreneurs break into two groups.

• Healthspanners want to extend the amount of time we spend living as healthy individuals—that is, not in a nursing home or on a hospital bed—followed by “compressed morbidity,” or a quick and painless death.
• Immortalists take it a step further. They believe that we can find the secret to eternal life.

What both camps do agree on: Aging is not a natural byproduct of time but rather a medical condition that can be treated — or even cured.

Further, they believe that conditions like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease are symptoms of an underlying problem: growing older.

In an article written for a16z, Vijay Pande and Kristen Fortney assert that:

“Even with our best efforts, best technologies, and best science for each of these major diseases, curing age related diseases one at a time is ultimately low impact. Let’s say we completely cured cancer; that would add a paltry 4 years to average lifespan, because another major killer like stroke would be just around the corner.”

Longevity scientists believe that targeted treatments are red herrings, of sorts — finding cures to every individual disease demands valuable resources while failing to address the root cause.

Currently, aging receives only 6% of government health research funding, yet studies show that increasing life expectancy by just one year would add a staggering $38T to the US economy.

S. Jay Olshansky, a professor studying aging at the University of Chicago, predicts that the first company to successfully slow, stop, or reverse aging will “dwarf any other current public health intervention to date in terms of impact.”

Road to Neverland

After decades of research, we now understand aging more than ever and, for the first time, are reaching a consensus on the factors that contribute to it.

As scientists pin down various biological mechanisms and experts predict more than $127B up for grabs, entrepreneurs and investors are rolling up their sleeves.

• David Sinclair and Peter Attia, both giants in the aging space, will be co-chairing a $200M biotech SPAC, Frontier Acquisition Corp., to acquire promising longevity startups.
• SENS Research Foundation recently received the largest cryptocurrency donation in history ($27M) to support R&D for aging therapies.
• Google-backed Calico Labs renewed its $1B partnership with AbbVie to continue R&D efforts into the underlying biology of aging.
• Altos Labs, a new anti-aging research company, just launched with backing from the world’s wealthiest, including Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner.

Looking ahead, emerging longevity tech falls into several buckets.

How old are you, for your age? A growing class of startups help you monitor your biological age (the state of cells) as opposed to chronological age (how old you are). Last year, BioAge secured $90M to measure and treat factors of aging, while EDIFICE Health, an OTC test kit to monitor “inflammatory age,” recently raised $12M.

Gene clean. Anti-aging gene therapy involves altering an organism’s DNA to reverse aging. Harvard startup Rejuvenate Bio secured over $10M in April to tackle age-related conditions with a single injection — and it’s experimenting on age reversal with dogs.

Out for blood. A form of cell therapy, young blood plasma transfusions have become an increasingly popular yet controversial trend in Silicon Valley after a 2014 study found that blood from young mice reversed aging in old mice.

• Spanish firm Grifols closed a $146M deal last year to buy blood transfusion startup Alkahest, valuing the company at nearly $300M.
• Elevian, founded by a team of Harvard scientists, raised $15M in equity funding last November to develop regenerative treatment based in blood plasma transferals.

Killing zombie cells. Senescent “zombie” cells, those which are aging or deteriorating, are linked to several age-related diseases like cancer. A leader in the space, Jeff Bezos-backed UNITY Biotechnology researches the anti-aging effects of banishing such cells and recently announced $80M in debt financing. Meanwhile, Seattle-based Oisín Biotechnologies raised $5M earlier in May.

One new liver, please. Another group of longevity startups focus on cell and organ regeneration. Leading the charge, tissue engineering company Humacyte went public via SPAC at a $1.1B market cap, while Vita Therapeutics secured $32M in June to rebuild muscle cells and develop technologies that could slow or reverse the effects of aging.

Looking Ahead

Despite massive interest and ample funding, the longevity industry faces an uphill climb. Studies are complicated and expensive, with some costing up to $65M and taking decades to conduct.

Further, most breakthrough longevity studies have only been performed on mice. Realistically, no company is anywhere close to releasing an anti-aging solution for humans.

This past month, in another setback for the longevity community, Aubrey de Grey, anti-aging guru and CEO of the SENS Research Foundation, was fired after allegations of sexual harassment and predatory behavior.

Beyond these challenges, some wonder whether aging is a part of life we simply shouldn’t seek to optimize.

“Eternity does not come cheap,” writes Ketan Desai, MD, imagining the potential tedium of immortality and strain on environmental resources.

Still others point to a deeper spiritual reason. Mortality is what makes our time on Earth precious — would a life without an end render it meaningless?