Investors splash billions into anti-aging initiatives as the longevity industry takes off

Dave Asprey is one of the most vocal champions of the movement to extend human life expectancy beyond 100 years. Aged 48, he is the founder of the Bulletproof wellness empire. Mr. Asprey has had stem cells removed from his own bone marrow and fat then re-injected into hundreds of locations on his body as an intervention to slow down aging. Outside of experimenting with his own body, Mr. Asprey has made millions packaging his discoveries into podcasts, consulting services, and consumer products. Asprey is just one of many Silicon Valley executives who are investing their money and time towards the problem of lifespan extension. Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and Sergey Brin are all engaged in longevity research funding or experimenting with anti-aging interventions. So far, efforts seem to be paying off. There are already a handful of therapies in clinical trials that have the potential to radically transform what ‘old age’ looks like. A person who’s middle-aged might reasonably expect to be as active when they reach 100. “If you do anti-aging right, you’ll have a level of resilience and energy to fight what comes your way. If you get Covid-19, you’re less likely to become very sick. The idea is that at a cellular level, you’re making yourself very hard to kill,” says Dave Asprey. Another leading longevity proponent who has been leading by example is Liz Parrish, the CEO of BioViva. In 2015, she underwent telomerase and follistatin gene therapies in Bogotá, Colombia. This entailed receiving about a hundred injections with genes along with a virus modified to deliver those new genes at the cellular level. The goal of the treatment was to lengthen her telomeres and prevent age-related muscle loss. Scientists have long known that the shortening of telomeres – the ‘caps’ at the end of our chromosomes — is a key biological hallmark of aging. Parrish believes that researchers and regulatory authorities such as the FDA need to move much quicker when it comes to advancing aging therapeutics. “There may be risks, but the known risk is that you’re 100 percent likely to die. So you have to decide for yourself if the potential benefit outweighs that,” she says. Jim Mellon is a British investor and businessman, and also the co-founder of Juvenescence – a 3-year-old pharmaceutical that’s investing in multiple technologies focused on lifespan and healthspan. Juvenescence has already developed a metabolism-boosting product in partnership with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. The company is also focused on senolytics, a class of drugs that destroy senescent cells. These are zombie cells that stop dividing as we age and secret compounds that cause disease-fueling inflammation. Mr. Mellon believes that the ‘stock-market mania’ for life extension is just around the corner and that more investors need to seize the opportunity. His views are supported by a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch that predicts the market for life-elongating technologies will increase sixfold to $610 billion over the next five years. “Working to extend life is an ethical cause. If we can help people to live healthfully until the end of life, we’ll transform the world completely. We’ll reduce a huge amount of pressure on failing healthcare systems, and we’ll have to reimagine pension and life insurance. This should be the number-one tick in anyone’s investment portfolio,” he says. While prescription senolytics are still years away, new research and increased focus show that such drugs are truly within reach. A June 2020 study published in Nature by researchers from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center showed that CAR T cells – which are typically used in precision cancer therapy – may also be used to target and kill senescent cells. Several biotech startups are already working on senolytics, including Unity Biotechnology – a San Francisco-based startup that already has three anti-aging drugs in clinical trials. Eric Verdin, 63, is the president and CEO at the Buck Institute, the globally renowned aging research center. Mr. Verdin’s Institute studies how the aging immune system is affected by lifestyle factors such as nutrition and exercise. Borrowing from his own research work, Mr. Verdin follows a time-restricted diet in which he eats all his meals in an 8-9 hour window. While he acknowledges that lifespan elongating breakthroughs may be just around the corner, he cautions against rushing to try experimental therapies. “A group of people have decided to try some expensive and dangerous interventions, but there is zero evidence that any of these are going to help them live longer,” he says. Mr. Verdin urges caution and emphasizes that the results of aging interventions in mouse trials may not always translate to success in humans. A biotech firm called resTORbio (which is a spinoff of Swiss-based Big Pharma company Novartis) recently sought FDA approval for its rapalog RTB101. This is a promising drug that has been shown by clinical trials to slow age-related decline of the immune system as well as improve immune response in elderly people by over 20 percent — thus helping protect aging populations from disease. “If health authorities approve this drug… we’ll have a product for people… to prevent age-related diseases. Not just in our lifetime, but in, you know, a few years,” said Joan Mannick, the cofounder and Chief Medical Officer of resTORbio. These promising developments in longevity research not only appeal to individuals but also governments and policymakers. For the majority of the human population, health starts to gradually decline in the last 15 years of life. Most elderly people persevere debilitating chronic conditions such as neurodegeneration, arthritis, and diabetes before they die. If ongoing efforts could come to fruition and help eliminate such diseases of aging, experts say the US could save an estimated $7.1 trillion in healthcare costs through the next 50 years.