Aging, much like inflation, is an inevitable process that diminishes the value of life over time. And while maintaining a healthy lifestyle—through diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management—can certainly help you stay healthier longer, these measures are not enough to stop the clock.
If you watch a day of U.S. TV programming from the 1930s and 1940s, you will see a massive focus on exercise, family health, and diet. However, none of the fitness instructors and dietitians in these commercials eating spinach, fasting, taking contrast showers, cold plunges, and doing gymnastics daily are alive today. They aged and died like everyone else.
Diet, exercise, sleep, meditation, avoiding bad behavior, bad relationships, and other “do what your mother told you” (DYMT) routines should be everyone’s baseline but will not produce miracles. I don’t even like talking about these basics and only the most advanced lifestyle studies, often combined with therapeutics, get presented at the Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) meeting, the annual five-day event bringing together pharma, startups, academics, and investors that I co-organize. Moreover, the basics of healthy living—diet, exercise, sleep, and meditation—are already accessible to everyone, yet very few take full advantage of them.
In contrast, the emerging field of longevity biotechnology offers the potential to beat the inflation of life. And while these new advancements will initially be available to the wealthy, history has shown that new treatments become more accessible and affordable over time.
The evolution of longevity biotechnology
Longevity biotechnology isn’t a new concept. As early as the 1990s, some biotech companies began targeting aging directly, focusing on areas such as telomerase activation, stem cell biology, and other promising hypotheses. Some of these companies even went public.
Despite the initial excitement and flashy headlines, all of these early ventures failed or switched focus away from aging. Most of these companies and their backers underestimated the complexity, costs, and time it would take to discover and develop a drug. Recent estimates suggest that developing a new drug takes over 10 years and costs upwards of $6.1 billion and the failure rates exceed 90%. This figure reflects the immense difficulty of identifying therapeutic targets, conducting preclinical and clinical trials, and navigating the regulatory landscape. When it comes to developing a drug specifically for aging, the challenges multiply, making it much more difficult to design effective interventions and demonstrate their efficacy in clinical trials.
Fast forward to today, and a new generation of longevity biotechnology companies with a more conservative approach than their predecessors has emerged. Companies like BioAge Labs and Insilico Medicine are using artificial intelligence (AI) to discover drugs that target specific chronic diseases or biological processes closely associated with aging. Instead of trying to develop therapies for aging directly, these companies focus on conditions that are closely linked to the aging process like obesity, muscle wasting, fibrosis, anemia, and even cancer.. The strategy is to develop drugs for these diseases that could later be repurposed to address aging more broadly. And while in the technology industry we try to focus on moving very fast to win, here we prepare to play a very long game and focus on resilience and novelty rather than putting all eggs in one basket and failing miserably like dozens of companies in the past three decades.
For instance, Insilico Medicine uses multimodal generative AI, vast datasets, and biological pathways associated with aging to identify dual-purpose therapeutics that are likely to work in specific diseases but may have a chance to be repurposed for the prevention of these diseases, combating age-associated processes.
The real question people should be asking isn’t about the potential downsides or dangers of these technologies, but rather, “Why isn’t this technology available yet? How can we accelerate its development and ensure that it starts saving lives sooner?”
Even if these technologies save the lives of the wealthy first, it does not mean we should not be developing them. Most likely, when people have the option to double or triple their healthy lifespans, they will be taking a much longer-term view toward the environment, sustainability, and global safety.
The role of insurers, pension funds, and investors in longevity
In my 2013 book, The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform The Global Economy, I predicted that insurers and pension funds will start investing in longevity biotechnology companies, presenting an opportunity to reduce healthcare expenses, as well as their longevity risk. This prediction could not be further from the truth.
The level of funding in longevity biotechnology has increased in the past few years as longevity-themed venture funds such as LongeVC, Longevity Vision Fund, and Longevity Fund emerged. However, they are still relatively small and insurance companies and pension funds do not yet play a role either in these funds—nor do they directly invest in longevity biotechnology companies.
Moreover, any time any longevity biotechnology company raises significant funds the media and analysts immediately report that the industry is overhyped. In 2023, Longevity Technology, a prominent industry analytical firm, published the Longevity Investment Report, showing quarterly investments in longevity. Excluding outliers like Altos Labs, which reported $3 billion in funding, quarterly investments in longevity averaged $200-300 million. In contrast, over $2.4 trillion were spent on the military, the industry of death, in 2023 alone globally.
Total global insurance premiums reached around $6.275 trillion in 2023, with a significant portion of the assets invested in equities and other higher-yield investments. Given the U.S. insurance industry’s dominance, it’s likely that global investments in equities by insurers reach well into the hundreds of billions annually, potentially surpassing $1 trillion when considering both direct and indirect equity investments across major markets. The pension fund industry is even larger than the insurance industry with assets exceeding $55.7 trillion, of which a significant amount is invested in equities. Virtually none of these investments touch the longevity biotechnology industry.
While beating the inflation of life may not yet be fully within our grasp, longevity biotechnology offers a promising avenue for significantly extending our healthy human lifespan. The new generation of biotech companies is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
While we see flashy headlines reporting millions invested in this emerging field, the amount of funding is still meager, and the toolkits for extending our longevity, besides “do what your mother told you” (DYMT) contain less than a handful of promising therapeutic interventions. The advent of “longevity medicine,” where physicians help their patients navigate the landscape of emerging therapeutics and act in a similar way as financial advisors by helping balance possible risks to make calculated returns is a promising development that could help us keep up with the inflation of life.
However, these physicians focus predominantly on diagnostics and optimizing the DYMT routines and supplements of their patients. Until we see the emergence of approved life-extending therapeutics, regardless of how rich and powerful you are, you will not be able to beat the inflation of life.
As we stand on the brink of potentially life-altering advancements, it’s essential to stay informed, engaged, and proactive. The decisions we make today will shape the future of health and longevity. Rather than fearing the unknown, we should focus on accelerating the development of these technologies and ensuring they benefit everyone. The real challenge isn’t just to live longer, but to do so in a way that is healthy, equitable, and sustainable.
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