The fat cats are pouring their billions into the development of life extension therapies that can halt or reverse aging. How much time can they buy?
By Dona Suri
The story of Juan Ponce de León, is well known. Back in 1513 the conquistador led an expedition through the swamps of Florida in search of the Fountain of Youth. His guides brought him to a spring in the vicinity of what is now the city of St Augustine and the Spaniard filled his helmet with the water. He drank it down proclaiming “Now old age will never touch me.”
Seven years later, the Calusa Indians got him with a poisoned arrow. The expedition limped back to Havana, and there he died aged just 47.
Old age never touched him.
Be careful what you wish for.
If old Juan came back today, he would have better luck. His guides could take him to several lavishly funded biotech institutes devoted to … well, the Fountain of Youth.
Ancient truism: “You can’t take it with you.”
It seems that the guys with the world’s deepest pockets have mulled over the old axiom and decided that if they can’t take it with them, they just won’t go. Or at least they intend to hang around as long as possible. They’re pouring their billions into the development of life extension therapies that can halt or reverse the human aging process.
The long-established medical and pharmaceutical research institutes (most of them with university ties) jumped into the longevity field back in the 1990s. More interesting are the newly established private organizations … and it’s not just what they’re doing, but who is picking up the tab.
One of the biggest (and richest) of the new research institutes is Altos Labs, Inc, founded in 2022. It’s bankrolled by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Russian oligarch Yuri Milner and a bunch of Silicon Valley tycoons to the tune of – well, exactly how many billions we don’t know, but Bezos alone chipped in $3 billion. Altos has multiple campuses in the USA, a campus in Cambridge, England and a tie-up with the Center for iPS Cell Research. (That’s the center in Kyoto where Shinyo Yamamako did the stem cell research that won him the 2012 Nobel Prize.)
Each scientist at Altos Labs is a star in his own right, and each is pursuing his own line of research, but they all share an overarching goal: reversing the biological clock. Altos Labs press releases modestly describe the research in terms of staving off the ailments of old age. Actually, for the Altos researchers, the disease is age itself.
Other players include the Methuselah Foundation whose mission statement is “Making 90 the new 50 by 2030“. The money behind this one comes from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, and the big data analyst Palantir. The Methuselah Foundation is not into research itself, rather it funds research and supports projects and awards prizes to accelerate breakthroughs in longevity-related biotech. Thiel thinks that by applying powerful computation to biology, it will be possible to “reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.” Money continues to pour in: like the $2.4 million donation from Vitalik Buterin, cofounder of the blockchain platform Ethereum.
The plutocrats believe in spreading their money around too. For the past seven years, Thiel, Bezos and other money-bags have been pumping funds into Unity Biotechnology, a company focused on developing treatments to address age-related diseases. Unity’s USP is therapies that flush out senescent cells. These are the so-called “zombie” cells” (old cells that should die but instead linger and release harmful substances). Scientists at the US Mayo Clinic discovered that if you engineer mice so the senescent cells slough off, they became healthier and live 20 to 30 per cent longer. Getting rid of zombie cells is a big deal in the quest for ways to stimulate, protect and rejuvenate cells.
The Ellison Medical Foundation, launched in 1997 with its campus in Bethesda, Maryland, supports live-longer research and it is bankrolled by — who else? — Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle. Ellison provides grants-in-aid to investigators at universities and laboratories within the United States who are doing
1) basic biomedical research on aging relevant to understanding aging processes and age-related diseases and disabilities or
2) basic molecular biological research on parasitology and infectious diseases that result from microbial, protozoan, or viral pathogenesis.
Human Longevity, Inc. is set up as a for-profit company rather than an institute. It commands huge funds socked in by investors, and it’s going after people who have the moolah to pay for advanced diagnostics and treatment to detect and preempt cancer, cardiac, metabolic and neurodegenerative disease etc.
Cancer is the major focus: the company plans to sequence 40,000 genomes per year, with an initial focus on cancer genomes. Behind this 2014 start-up are three high-fliers (literally): Dr Peter H. Diamandis, a polymath with a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT and a doctor’s degree from Harvard Medical School; Dr Robert Hariri, neurosurgeon, biomedical scientist, and aerospace entrepreneur, pioneer of placenta-based stem-cell research, and Craig Venter, biotechnologist entrepreneur, known for figuring out first draft human genome sequences. HLI taps every technique known so far to deliver “high performance human lifespan”.
Then there’s Calico (California Life Company); launched by Google. It’s been running for the past ten years without revealing exactly what it’s up to. The only description coming out of Calico is that it is a “research and development company focused on aging and associated diseases”. At last count, it was funded to the tune of $1.5 billion. Writing in MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado called Calico ”a super-secretive company that hasn’t published anything of note, rebuffs journalists, and asks visiting scientists to sign nondisclosure agreements.” But Calico must be doing something because, one after another, pharmaceutical companies are entering tie-ups with it. It is known that the company has three potential drugs in early clinical trials but no details are available.
Here’s another billionaire: Sam Altman, the guy behind ChatGPT. Last year, at about the same time that he unleashed ChatGPT, Altman sunk $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a San Francisco-based biotech company whose announced goal is to add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan. (Did ChatGPT tell him to do it?) A year before that he put $375 million into Helion Energy, a fusion energy startup chasing the dream of limitless clean energy.
So where’s Bill Gates?
Turns out that Gates takes a dim view: Speaking on an “ask me anything” forum on Reddit after Calico launched, Gates was unimpressed: “It seems pretty egocentric, while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.” Advances in longevity science risk widening the gap between the rich and poor in health, wealth and power.
Among Gates’ musings: Dictators are definitely going to want to extend their lives. In the normal course, a weary populace looks forward to the day when their aging stinker kicks the bucket. Longevity treatments will put a real strain on patience. Sweet thoughts of assassination will gain added charm. Gates said that he would rather have democratic change than drastic measures.
But clearly Gates is bucking the trend.
There is so much going on in the field of longevity research that a series of posts could be written week after week and still not touch on all the new discoveries, all the new leads, all the new methodologies, all the new players … and certainly not all the new theories.
And we haven’t even hinted at the scores of ethical, moral, social, political, environmental questions that would be raised if it actually became possible to extend human life decades beyond the biblical three-score and ten. Privately funded institutes are under no compulsion to make findings or treatments available to everyone. People who invest millions expect to profit in billions. Obviously, the target market for longevity treatments is the very well heeled. A gazillion-dollars’ worth of treatment for a handful of people?
A really possible 200th birthday would put a whole new spin on the term “pro-life”
One thing is for sure: it’s all about the money. The USA has many more people over age 65 than under age 15. Even a miser will fork out for additional years … especially if they are healthy years. The first company that can really and truly market youth in a bottle will become richer than Croesus.
Croesus?
That’s another old story. Read it if you like https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Croesus/273862
As usual with such stories, it ends in tears.)
