Investors are pouring money into startups that want help us live longer, but they're all facing the same key challenge
- Investors are pouring money into health startups that aim to beat aging.
- While some companies focus on creating drugs for age-related diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, others aim to address the more visible components of aging, such as muscle loss and skin health.
- But regulators have yet to define aging, meaning the path to treatments remains hazy.
- However, progress is being made, several executives told Business Insider. Here's what you should know.
Investors are pouring money into health startups that aim to beat aging.
There's just one small problem.
Health regulators, including the US Food and Drug Administration, have yet to define aging as a medical condition. In and of itself, growing old is not an illness in need of treatments. Rather, it is a set of still poorly-understood ailments which crop up in old age - from diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer to conditions like muscle decay and hair loss - that can dramatically curb a person's quality of life.
"Aging is the single greatest risk factor for some of the worst diseases on Earth," Ben Kamens, the founder and CEO of a new anti-aging startup called Spring Discovery, recently told Business Insider.
Indeed, as we get older, the risk of many diseases - from cancer to heart disease to Alzheimer's - skyrockets. But without an agreed-upon definition of aging, the path forward for therapies, drugs, or other interventions that aim to treat it remains somewhat obscure, according to the authors of a recent paper summarizing the outcomes of an international meeting on anti-aging therapies convened by the National Institutes of Health.
That means one of the "ultimate goals" of studies which test potential anti-aging treatments is "FDA approval for an aging-related indication," the authors concluded.
The FDA is working on criteria for such an indication, according to executives at several longevity companies who spoke to Business Insider anonymously, because the agency has yet to make the list of criteria public.
Part of that work, the executives said, includes creating a list of the hallmark components of aging. It currently includes elements like frailty, muscle loss, and reduced cognitive function, they said. (An FDA spokesperson told Business Insider they could not discuss details of the agency's work on the matter because those plans were not public.)
In the meantime, longevity is a hot and growing area for nascent companies. And people at those companies say now is the best time to be in the field. Here's why.
Longevity is more than skin deep
Dozens of new companies have flocked to the anti-aging field in recent years. As of last fall, investors had bet a total of $850 million on anti-aging and longevity startups in 2018, nearly triple the amount they contributed to the field the year prior, according to an October report from the CB Insights. Before 2016, the longevity field was almost non-existent, the report's authors concluded.
But in the absence of a formal definition of senescence, insiders at these longevity companies must decide whether to place their bets on one of several aspects of aging. The majority seem to either focus on aging's visible components, such as hair loss and skin elasticity, or narrow in on conditions that manifest beneath the surface, such as diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, and arthritis.
Those who are betting on the latter are concentrating their efforts on speeding up the process of creating better drugs for age-related diseases.
A longevity company called Alkahest, for example, screens blood plasma for proteins that could eventually be used to create targeted drugs for a type of eye disease that crops up in old age.
Elizabeth Jeffords, Alkahest's chief commercial and strategy officer, told Business Insider that although the company initially considered focusing on the more visible symptoms of aging, it ultimately decided to home in on age-related disease.
"We did this soul-searching and strategically said you know what, no, we really want to put [our effort] to where it could do the most good, and that's in these critical disease-related aging areas," Jeffords said.
Relatedly, the researchers at Spring Discovery and Insilico Medicine are trying to hasten the drug discovery process using advanced data analysis tools.
Other startups aim to allow people to preserve their own personal fountains of youth. Forever Labs, for example, lets customers bank their stem cells, which naturally regenerate and can develop into many different cell types, from those that make up muscle to those that form brain cells.
Yet these startups all lack a clearly-defined illness which their therapies would eventually treat. They face another obstacle, too: designing the kinds of studies that would enable them to assess whether their treatments work.
The fight to 'unlock a whole new set of tools'
Designing studies to test whether anti-aging treatments are effective "poses a unique set of challenges," the NIH researchers concluded in their paper.
The aging population is highly diverse, for example. Also, most people will develop several conditions and diseases as they age, as opposed to a single illness that can be targeted alone.
But within the past year, researchers at several leading health organizations including the World Health Organization, the European Medicines Agency, and the FDA have all taken strides to improve these efforts.
The World Health Organization, for example, recently added "aging-related" to its international list of diseases. Last year, the European Medicines Agency published a paper that seeks to come up with an official definition for frailty, which is currently regarded simply as weakness or infirmity, for use in clinical trials.
Robert Temple, the FDA's deputy center director for clinical science, told Business Insider that although he could not confirm which aspects of aging the agency will ultimately use to assess potential treatments, regulators are currently thinking about both age-related diseases and other age-related effects, like the loss of skin elasticity or the fading of muscle tone.
Official definitions notwithstanding, the folks behind anti-aging companies say now is the most exciting time to be in the field.
And when endpoints for aging do eventually service, they'll "help unlock a whole new set of tools," Spring Discovery's Kamens said.
"It's going to happen at some point."