On September 3, Peter Diamandis sent out this provocative little tweet:
In a way, it’s encouraging: ditch the late-night deep-dish pizza, log an extra couple of miles on the treadmill, and voila — you can comfortably expect a much, much longer life than you’re probably anticipating right now.
But is there any truth to the claim?
Diamandis is well known in tech circles — maybe most notably as the Founder & Executive Chairman of XPRIZE, which offers global crowdsourcing innovation challenges, and the Executive Chairman & Co-Founder of Singularity University, which delivers executive educational programs and business consultancy services.
Diamandis is also deeply involved in the rapidly growing ‘longevity sector.’ For example, he’s also the President of Vaxxinity which has a mission to “Democratize health by pioneering the third biologic revolution.”
You’d be forgiven if you’re confused about what that means.
You’d also be right to be suspicious, as Diamandis has a checkered past on related issues. As MIT Technology Review reported, back in 2021, Diamandis hosted a conference only to see it turn into a COVID-19 super spreader event. His response was to launch a subsequent webinar to calm attendees, where they were reportedly offered “fraudulent COVID-19 treatments, from injectable peptides to amniotic fluid.”
So, yes. Consider the source.
Still, there might be something there. There are billions in venture capital now pouring into the industry, with a high of over $6 billion allocated to firms in 2021. There’s also something intuitive about the idea that as medicine and technology improve, and we gather more evidence about protecting our health, our lifespans will get longer. That’s been the general trajectory of the human race for hundreds of years now. In many western countries, human lifespan has roughly doubled over the last two hundred years.
Why would things stop now?
What is the longevity industry?
Fundamentally, the longevity sector is new enough (it’s less than a decade old) and poorly understood enough to be the subject of a debate about what it actually is. The most common way to describe it is a sector that is focused on extending human lifespan — or human healthspan, depending on who you talk to or what company is being hyped.
The real confusion hits when you get to the details.
The longevity industry incorporates multiple poorly understood sectors like biomedicine and biotech, geroscience (effectively, the study of the risks of aging), and agetech (which addresses the needs of aging people). Recent advancements in AI are also part of the reason the sector is suddenly so intriguing. They may unlock some of the exciting possibilities of human healthspan expansion.
This is probably a good place to make the distinction between lifespan and healthspan. Lifespan is fairly obvious. But healthspan refers to the period of time someone can live without suffering from chronic or debilitating disease. Live to 87 while golfing, traveling, and living your best life until the day you die? Great. Live to 95 but spend the last 20 years of your life being shuttled in and out of hospitals? Less great.
The longevity industry is looking beyond both of these horizons. Prognosticators like Diamandis are forecasting the ability for humans to live to the age of 120, 130, or even longer with healthspans that extend just as long.
How big a leap is this longevity movement from where we are today?
If you’ve been tracking the digital transformation of the healthcare sector, the longevity movement may seem a bit far-fetched.
The stories of modern digital health tend to be focused on more prosaic issues: the efforts to digitize health records, the struggle to share information across health care providers, and the privacy implications of both.
We have seen advances in cancer treatments, telehealth, and considerable focus on what digital healthcare delivery can do for rapidly aging populations around the world.
But the narrative has not focused on ‘moonshot-style’ health outcomes.
However, there has been a simultaneous and significant shift going on amongst innovators and scientists in the healthcare industry, as Deloitte noted:
“We are beginning to see a paradigm shift from disease-focused treatments to those that address the underlying mechanisms of aging, biological systems, and wellness. In fact, a growing community of scientific researchers believe they have the tools to extend healthy human life, transforming health care as we know it today.”
This reframing of the opportunity could be the significant unlock for longevity. Global spending on healthcare runs to about $9 trillion USD which feels even bigger when you see it with all its attendant digits: $9,000,000,000,000.
This is about 11% of the total GDP of all nations on Earth.
If the focus of that spending shifted primarily to eliminating the underlying causes of aging and disease instead of treating them, what would that mean for the future of the longevity industry — and the lives of everyday people?
Retro Biosciences & other notable companies that may extend your life — and health
In 2022, a company called Retro Biosciences emerged with $180 million in venture capital and a mission to ‘add 10 years to the healthy human lifespan’ by ‘focusing on the cellular drivers of aging to design therapeutics eventually capable of multi-disease prevention.’
MIT Technology Review then revealed that all Retro Biosciences’ money came from Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT.
Retro Biosciences is a useful analog for many longevity companies. It’s extraordinarily capital intensive and its timeline to commercialize and scale its outputs is much longer than many investors could tolerate. This is especially true, given the need for regulatory approvals for some of the potential treatments or products that would affect human health.
As Samuel Gil, Partner at JME Ventures told TechCrunch: “The main challenge of the space is that the most audacious approaches and products have to be clinically tested in large samples of the population for very long periods of time.”
But Gil is ultimately a longevity optimist: “Although the target market for most products is still very niche at the moment, I do believe that they will go mainstream in the medium term. The opportunities are endless, as the space is only getting started now and will infiltrate all aspects of our life in the next five to 10 years.”
Retro Biosciences is one of a handful of notable new companies focused on longevity. Others include the Jeff Bezos-co-founded Alto Labs, which seeks to reverse disease, injury, and disabilities through cellular rejuvenation programming; Juvenescence, which is developing therapeutic interventions that will enable people worldwide to live longer, healthier lives; and Unity Biotechnology, which is developing medicines to slow, halt, or revere diseases of aging.
Ultimately, there are real reasons to be very cynical about big claims coming out of Silicon Valley, especially those that haven’t been proven out. But expanding human longevity and healthspan is one of tech’s more noble missions. And that could kick off a new era of human flourishing, both physically and financially.
To wit: Christian Angermayer, Founder of Aperion Investment Group, told TechCrunch that while there are no current products in-market that have been proven to delay aging, once there are, everything will change.
“Once the first ones are proven in a clinical trial, we expect that to go from zero to a trillion-dollar industry within a decade. It will be that fast.”
