Longevity: Do we want to be only spectators?

For longevity, we mean the extension of the average healthy lifespan — or health span. The longevity industry has its sights set on a world with a much lower level of age-related diseases enabling the eventual end-user to live an optimal life.

A recent McKinsey report states that the biopharma industry has moved further digitally in the past 12 months than in the previous 10 years. Covid-19 has accelerated the speed of how the biotech capital markets, and the longevity sector, in particular, are growing.

Think of Google-backed secretive aging company Calico Labs, which hopes to uncover the biological processes behind aging and tackle age-related diseases such as neurodegeneration and cancer.

Or Bezos, Amazon’s founder, who has invested in Altos Labs, a new start-up pursuing biological reprogramming to rejuvenate cells in the lab. The company reportedly intends to apply the technology to entire animal bodies, ultimately halting biological ageing and extending the human lifespan.

Though a recent study has suggested that the ageing process might simply be unstoppable, proponents of biological reprogramming believe ageing is far more malleable than we think.

And why do they think so? Because medicine has evolved: innovations like genome sequencing, RNA transcriptomics, vaccines, liquid biopsies, CAR-T cells, Gene Therapy, exosomes, and stem cells are just a sampling of the newest technologies.

This is why I dedicated the last year of my life to studying and researching longevity. Even if extending lifespan were only a remote possibility would it not be worth investing on it? I will dedicate several posts in the next weeks to this new project and explain what science and huge research groups worldwide are looking at.