ENDEAVORING TO EXTEND LIFE
New venture capital company sets its sights on cracking code to aging
Alex Colville had just completed his Ph.D. in genetics at Stanford when he met Laura Deming, the wunderkind who dropped out of MIT at 16 and launched The Longevity Fund.
At an age when most teenagers already believe they'll live forever, Deming started a first-of-its-kind venture company in 2011 to invest in revolutionary technologies that would attempt, at least, to prolong life. At the time, Deming was calling the scientific potential to slow the progression of time on the human body an “almost inconceivable notion,” “an almost terrifying truth.”
Now, Colville, 30, and Deming, 29, are teaming up to try to push the technology even closer to reality, launching The Longevity Fund's next generation: a new venture fund called age1. The company, which started as an accelerator with backing from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in 2018, had an initial closing of $35 million targeting companies attempting to crack the code for extending human lifespans.
Colville insists his generation is bringing a new attitude and a broader scope for impending breakthroughs in the world of aging research.
“This isn't just a field that is carried on by rich, old billionaires trying to live forever,” Colville said in a recent interview. “There really is a very large contingent of younger folks who realize the true potential this field has to benefit all of us — to keep all of us healthier longer, and to give us the agency to choose how long we have to live in good health.”
Q
Life expectancy already has increased dramatically over the past generations. Why do we want to keep extending it?
A
If we look back at the past 100 years of medicine and technological advancements, the advent of antibiotics, wastewater treatment, sewage, we've had so many technological advances that have given us these tremendous increases in average lifespan of the population. … Not too many people complain about the option to be able to
stay healthier longer, and I think that's really the biggest focus of why to continue to work to expand that.
Q
Longer living, though, also means more suffering, more financial burdens on society. What about that?
A
If you look at the U.S. today and worldwide, the amount of health expenditure that we have that goes to chronic agerelated diseases is astronomical, let alone the actual burden it places on caregivers and on families. So the question of “why to keep going” — it's because these problems still exist. And as our population gets older and older, and as we experience this birth rate collapse, this is just going to continue to increase in terms of priority.
Q
What kinds of companies or research is your company investing in to solve some of these problems?
A
Our biggest focus is on longevity biotechnology companies — pretty standard looking biotechnology or drug pharmaceutical companies that are developing interventions to target aging. One of our favorite portfolio companies is a company called Loyal, which is working on dog aging, and they're in essence developing drug interventions to be able to extend the health span — the period spent in healthy years — for dogs. (The technology) shifts from targeting a single age-related disease to targeting multiple different diseases at the same time with a single intervention. That's our biggest
focus as a fund — trying to shift the space more in that direction.
Q
I have a little 10-pound Maltipoo, Buddy, who will be 17
years old. He's blind and deaf and has an enlarged heart and collapsing trachea and he moves around the house like a Roomba. So what is the benefit of some of these things on a dog like mine, much less elderly people?
A
In the instance of your dog, that area of the longevity biotechnology field is really in its infancy. This ability to turn back the clock and experience true rejuvenation is one of the things we are most excited about, but also simultaneously it's one of the subfields of aging that has the least amount of data supporting it. So it's superpromising. There have been big moonshot bets in this space recently and the news like Altos Labs, which is a $3 billion forprofit company devoted to this notion of being able to turn back the clock. However, it's still nascent science, so we are most focused on intervening before losing a lot of quality of life and health.
Q
Are you essentially looking for the Fountain of Youth?
A
I certainly wouldn't put it in that terms. I
would put it in the terms of standing on the shoulders of giants of the academic research that's been conducted in the aging field to work hard at translating some of these insights into some basic interventions to actually slow or delay the aging process. And the cool part is that it's something we've seen in model organisms and animals for over 40 years in academia — this ability to modify aging and dramatically extend the lifespan of worms and mice. And the real trick, especially for us, is to get more shots on goal of trying out some of these interventions in humans in a very safe and thoughtful way.
Q
When you say that some of these technologies will give people “the option” of living longer, isn't that just code for rich people?
A
The health care system is set up so that pretty much after 15 years, drugs go off-patent and are widely available to everybody as a generic. It's going to be no different in the aging field. And the markets really exist at scale. So the market for billionaires is nowhere near the market size of developing something that everybody on the planet would be willing to take or would want to take, right? If you think about cellphones, billionaires have the same iPhones that we do.
Q
When you sit around with friends and talk about this stuff, how long do you say you want to live?
A
I say I want to live another 10 years from now in great health and that they should check in with me then to see if the answer remains the same.