We as a species are living longer. Right now, the average American
lives for about 80 years. And the question is,
how long could we live? We actually don't know the answer to that. This question is at the center of the burgeoning field
of longevity science, and biotech startups believe
we are closer than ever to unprecedented lifespan. A recent explosion of longevity startups has created a new speculative
industry almost overnight. Oxford economics estimated longevity to be worth $7.6 trillion. In order to reach its potential, right, really needs to have a way
of getting to the market as fast as we can possibly do it. [Narrator] But some fear
whatever breakthrough may happen will never really serve
the average person. Rather, it will favor the few
who are sinking their fortunes into these startups. It's a pretty concentrated
group of investors. From our estimates, it's like nearly 50% has
come from individuals. That's a nicer way of saying billionaires. I have to be honest, a large part is egoistic
because the billionaires they are getting older and
they have a lot of money and they still have a lot of ambitions. They want to live longer
when they age better. When people think about longevity, the thing that comes to
mind is usually, you know, some eccentric billionaire
trying to live forever. But what longevity really is is just the science of
helping us live longer. And also the science of helping
us live more healthfully. Anything that comes out of this space won't be just for the rich. Humans have been trying to cheat death since we climbed down from the trees. The Fountain of Youth was a mythical place where you could drink
waters from its springs to rejuvenate your aging body. It first appeared in writing
around the fifth century BC and the search hasn't stopped since. Folklore has it that Spanish
Explorer Ponce de Leon searched in vain for magical waters
with restorative powers in modern day Florida and The Bahamas. But historians agree that most of his time was actually spent searching for something a bit more earthly. Not only was he searching for gold, but expeditions like his were
expensive and in constant need of fundraising from the
throne across the Atlantic. Today, the modern quest
for prolonged youth remains very expensive. Last year, more than $2
billion in venture funding went into the longevity space. So this is a space that
people are excited about and they are putting their money into it. But this expedition is funded mostly by a different sort of royalty. We have heard recently, you
know, that famous people, such as Jeff Bezos
invested, not only millions, but actually billions into
new startup companies. And I think you know, it is totally justified this investment. While this narrative of this super rich making an elixir of life for
themselves at the expense of the rest of the world world makes for good Bond villain material, it doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. I love it. The narrative about lots of billionaires coming into this longevity space, it's played up more than it
needs to be because in general, like VC funds are backed by billionaires or families of billionaires. This is sort of the artery of the the worldwide innovation economy is people who have the
capital on hand to be able to do these big, sometimes
risky, investments. I don't think that
impression is entirely wrong but it's also not fully correct. And it really fails to
recognize the ways in which the edges of human knowledge and capacity are always explored on the outskirts by a handful of individuals who are uniquely motivated
and uniquely resourced. It never happens with
technology that somehow that that then stays secretive and closed up in a box and
only effective for them. As it turns out the
science of pharmacology and even the basic laws
of supply and demand don't really allow for
an elite super drug. That first pill that you
create or that first injection or whatever it is that
might cost, you know, $500 million to make that first pill. The second one probably
cost a fraction of a penny. And so if you were to do the math of like the supply and
demand aspects of this, it doesn't make sense to make
a really expensive medicine that only a few billionaires take when you can make something really cheap but make it for everybody. And there's another reason why private billionaires and
VC's are flooding this space. As it turns out, longevity
health doesn't exactly fit into the current healthcare model making it risky and more complicated to traditional pharmaceutical investors. The major regulatory
bodies that look at states of disease, so the CDC, the FDA, they don't consider death an illness. Of all of the clinical endpoints
that we generally look at therapeutics alleviating
the suffering of humans, interestingly, death isn't one of them. Many people, very accurately, particularly as we live
longer and healthier lives, are pausing and saying, well, wait, why do I wait to get involved with the healthcare system until I'm sick? And why is there no baseline
of what being healthy is? There have been a lot of
people with resources, i.e. billionaires, who are saying, I know the best practices for
living long and healthy lives but what are the treatments
to alleviate some of these symptoms of aging? And all the classic
investors in the space said, I don't really know how to fathom that. I don't know what to do with these kind of soft
clinical endpoints. And I absolutely don't know
how to invest on the metric of you make an investment today, you engage with a therapeutic practice, and then hopefully we find out in 50 years that you lived 10 healthier years than you might have otherwise, right? That feedback loop is way too long. And that's really what's
enabled investors like ourselves to start participating in this market. What's more, longevity science itself challenges much of the healthcare
status quo as we know it. Everyone in the space agrees
that for real longevity to be achieved, there needs to
be a massive paradigm shift. We are locked into a system where we wait for people to get sick and
then try to treat them. And that system worked really
well a hundred years ago when infectious diseases were the cause of death for everybody. If you come in with a heart attack or with stage three cancer or with early stage Alzheimer's disease, so much has already
broken down in our bodies by the time that that doctor
is seeing that patient that it is so complex to
imagine how we would fix all of the pieces that have come apart. All of these future technologies,
these future medicines, they're built around
this idea of prevention. The notion that we could
switch from a healthcare system that is primarily reactive,
wait for someone to get sick, to one that is more proactive, right? Give someone a drug so that
they could then stay healthy. So a more technically accurate
term for a longevity drug would be a multi-disease preventative, something that can keep
you from getting cancer or Alzheimer's disease
or having a heart attack. The amazing potential of this science is that we could have a single drug that makes all of those things happen further in the future than
they would otherwise have. As of today, a single
longevity drug remains as real as the Fountain
of Youth and experts agree that regardless of the technology, longevity is a multi-pronged
effort using everything from biomarkers and cellular
rejuvenation to gene editing, diet, and exercise. There will likely never be a
one-size-fits-all solution. And to accomplish this longevity startups are taking
an interdisciplinary approach to the science. Scientists have really
started breaking down all of the little things that
happen to us as we age. And there are a lot of them, but I like to break them
down into three categories. Our top category is stuff that happens at the whole tissue level. We call it like changes in how
our tissues are put together. We have stem cells that
get exhausted as we age and now they can't make
new copies of themselves. And then if you zoom in into the cell, there are changes that happen
at the molecular level, specific molecules that
can't be broken down by our normal recycling
mechanisms that build up little by little as we get older. The business model of these startups largely mirror this diverse
approach, casting a wide net across both academic
science and pharmacology. It's kind of a new model where you don't focus
on one single technology or one single therapeutic area because longevity is a
very complex approach where many biological mechanisms are interacted and intertwined. So we'd like to have the
scientists interacting with each other even though they have a
specific scientific fields. We have like an incubator space. We bring in a cutting-edge science. We collaborate with academic
leaders in the field and we bring in scientific entrepreneurs to bring this breakthrough
science into our labs here in Zurich. So we have labs and offices and then we have very
experienced traditional pharma. People who know how to
discover and develop drugs in this completely novel field. Where we find a great scientist who has made a great discovery,
bring it into Cambrian, and then use the fact that
we have a team of chemists and drug developers and
researchers, and you know, people who understand the
biotech market and all of this to foster that internally. This aggregation model helps biotechs hedge their bets against an
admittedly high-risk venture. Drug development is risky, right? So when you start a drug in
clinical trials or human trials, you only have about a one
in seven chance of that drug making it all the way through. It's three phases of
clinical trials to approval. But if you pull together
20 of these different ideas into one entity and resource them all, then all of a sudden that risk
goes up to about a 95% chance that you'll get at least one hit. And so the math of drug
development makes a lot more sense as a collective than as individuals. Even with so many bets on the table, there's no guarantee that
a breakthrough will happen under their roof. Recently, a study funded
through traditional grants out of the Salk Institute
successfully extended the lifespan of mice. And while mouse studies are not considered breakthrough discoveries, it has gotten the attention
of the scientific community. We developed an approach
called partial reprogramming. Basically where we express a set of genes which can actually reprogram the cells without losing their identity. We were able to erase the signs of aging. We were able to extend
its life by 30% almost. So basically this kind of demonstrates that partial programming,
there is a way to rework some of the aging marks in cells and tissues and which can eventually
have a beneficial effect on the whole organism. The partial program approach
was even tested in human cells. So we were able to reword, take cells from an aged individual and
apply these partial programming and erase these signs
of aging in the cells. So the conceptually, it
works even in human cells. The keyword here is conceptually. The science is in such early stages and it grows every day. What we have is all of these
really interesting data points, right, from human studies
from mouse studies but we're many, many
years, if not decades away from concrete answers that tell us how these things contribute to how we age. And this speaks to another misconception about longevity. This community as a whole,
isn't so much focused on increasing our lifespan
as much as they are on improving our quality
of life as we age. It's not our aim and I don't think anyone can prevent death, right? Ultimately we will still all die, but our aim is that until we die, that we have the best
life that we can have. In the longevity world, almost nobody's talking about lifespan. They're all talking about health span, the amount of time that
we spend in good health. And if we prioritize
expanding health span, increasing lifespan may
be a side effect of that.
Best part of the video was when they said "50% of funding has come from individuals" meaning billionaires. If billionaires are all hands on deck like this it means they want results because time is running out for them just like everybody else.
EDIT: Video is very nicely done
The caption is cringey, but the video was surprisingly very good. They actually talked with people working in this space, like James Peyer of https://www.cambrianbio.com/.
Watching more and more people joining the anti-aging effort is like seeing the Avengers assemble
Interesting spread of Youtube comments. I was expecting a sea of negativity and "it might help a rich person therefore it is bad", but it's pretty much 50-50. One guy even said the video was too pessimistic.
I mean, there are no insights there, so don't bother wading in if you value your time. But it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected.
Bloomberg QuickTake, nice. I wonder if Bloomberg himself is throwing money at this stuff
Good video for a generic overlook of the industry but doesn't really have any exciting information to someone who is well versed in the industry.
Oh course they had to say the word healthspan. Of course. And of course the usual "you still have to die and we aren't trying to fix death" bullshit towards the end of the video.
If you cure every age-related disease, what are people going to die of, exactly? Of the clock running out?
Good video.