Longevity Industry

The Longevity International Project, conducted by the Aging Analytics Agency, was launched by the Biogerontology Research Foundation and the Deep Knowledge Ventures investment fund.

Various companies and non-profit initiatives that are part of the growing anti-aging community, such as In Silico Medicine and the International Aging Research Portfolio, share their views on the available data.

The specialists involved in this have a lot of information about financing, technologies, what issues different researchers in this field are dealing with, as well as about the market of young biotech companies.

Aging Analytics Agency is a consulting firm whose goal is to put into practice subject knowledge in this field. Its target audience is investment firms and large companies that have recently begun to show interest in medical methods to combat aging. Currently, they are attracted to this industry by the results of active work with senolytics and other areas of rejuvenation biotechnology.

At the moment, I would like to mention the Longevity Industry Landscape Overview for 2017 (A large-scale review of the longevity industry 2017).

In it, the authors pay more attention to the manifestations of aging, unlike SENS, which delves more into the causes of aging. However, we can find points of coincidence – confirmation that aging has a root cause, manifested by damage to cells and tissues, and that the impact on these damages is a movement forward.

If the struggle to move forward turns into a fierce reasoned dispute over which forms of damage are the true causes of aging and how to deal with them, this indicates significant improvements in the current state of affairs, the main task of which is the need to convince more and more people that aging is, in principle, a real target for medicine, and rejuvenation is an achievable goal of the near future. However, to do this, it is necessary to increase funding for the right research areas.

Excerpts from the first volume of the review:

The term "geroscience", introduced by the US National Institute on Aging (NIA), means "the field of biological sciences that studies the role of aging in the development of diseases." Of the total annual budget of the institute, amounting to 1.6 billion US dollars, only 183.1 million is spent on the fundamental "biology of aging", while most of the funds are spent on the study of Alzheimer's disease and other age-related diseases. The application of the fundamental knowledge gained by specialists in the field of geroscience makes it possible to develop therapies that prevent and/or reverse molecular or cellular damage caused by aging. By slowing down or reversing the aging process, all age-related diseases can be affected, which will increase the duration of a healthy life.

Rejuvenation biotechnology is a translational, clinical and applied derivative of geroscience. The purpose of this direction is to prevent and restore the fundamental damage caused by aging. These damages may include: somatic DNA damage, telomere shortening, genome instability associated with transposons, decreased activity of autophagy and protein cycling, epigenetic shifts, depletion of stem cells, the appearance of end products of enhanced glycosylation, etc.

The currently observed aging of the global population is due to an increase in life expectancy (despite poor health) and a tendency among residents of Western countries to give birth to fewer children. This is a serious problem for public health and pension systems. Economists call this profound population shift, which has no precedent in history, a "silver tsunami." The best way to prevent a catastrophe for these state systems is to slow down or reverse the aging process. This will increase the average life expectancy and reduce the number of years that each person spends in a socially costly state of chronic diseases and decrepitude.

The traditional medical model has worked very well for certain acute conditions, such as infection and traumatic injury. People no longer die from infections that were the leading cause of death a hundred years ago. Chronic lifestyle and age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes mellitus, stroke and dementia have become the leading causes of death in Western countries. Modern medicine cannot cope with these multifactorial diseases. Given that biological age is the main risk factor, it makes sense to act on the damage that causes aging, and not on the symptoms that are their final manifestations.

There are two types of drugs:

• Type A – innovative blockbusters, the first in its group of drugs of a wide market, such as statins, antidepressants and drugs that improve the quality of life;
• Type B – additional best-in-class drugs that provide increased safety or efficacy compared to existing molecules, but do not affect the new biochemical mechanism.

Anti-aging drugs will belong to type A. Given the universality of aging, the market for anti-aging drugs will be larger than the market for any other drug. The destructiveness of rejuvenation biotechnology lies in the fact that it will displace therapeutic approaches that affect age-related diseases. Suppose that gene therapy (affecting the expression of APOE4 or FOXO3A genes) reverses the aging of the cardiovascular system and the development of atherosclerosis. Almost no one will need statin drugs (including atorvastatin, the best–selling pharmaceutical drug in history, bringing Pfizer 125 billion US dollars a year for 14.5 years). Similarly, why try to selectively kill malignant cells if there is a drug that repairs DNA damage, suppresses inflammation and reverses the physiological aging of the immune system, so greatly increasing the incidence of cancer in old age?

Biotechnology and, in particular, geroscience are on the verge of a "Cambrian explosion" in modern life sciences. They will ensure the transformation of healthcare into information science, capable of improving the human condition even more than the invention of antibiotics, modern molecular pharmacology and the "green revolution" of the 1960s. The dynamics of this serious evolutionary transformation, as well as our prospects to live to take advantage of these breakthroughs, depend on the choice made now by the scientific and investment communities.

Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on the materials of Fight Aging!: Longevity Industry Whitepapers from the Aging Analytics Agency.