The industry sector focused on aging is only about 10 years old, but acting on what scientists already know, a new crop of biotechs, backed by investors, are taking a disease-centric approach to extending the human lifespan.
Everyone grows old and everyone dies—that is an immutable fact of life. Recently, however, a growing sector in the biotech industry is seeking to challenge that, looking for ways to improve the process of aging and push the boundaries of human longevity.
“The objective is to change the way we age, not to eliminate aging,” Ana Maria Cuervo, co-director of the Institute for Aging Studies at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told BioSpace in an email. “The interest is less in ‘longevity’ per se, and more in ‘healthy longevity.’”
“The goal is not to target a specific disease, but to target the processes and mechanisms that drive the loss of function,” she continued. “If done right, the incidence and progression of all age-associated diseases will decrease.”
This sector is young—about 10 years or so, Cuervo estimates. The first few years, efforts were focused on elucidating the biological underpinnings of how people age, though many questions remain unanswered. For one, the ways in which the different drivers of aging interact with each other is still not completely understood, nor the effects of inter-individual differences.
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As scientists chip away at these questions, the longevity space has started acting on what data it already has. “Because much of the experimental evidence supports the idea that interventions targeting these drivers (or hallmarks) are feasible and beneficial,” companies in recent years have started designing pharmaceutical agents for this purpose, Cuervo said.
The complexity of aging as a biological process has given companies a wide variety of options for intervention, Robert Williamson, co-founder of Morena Technologies and CEO of a biotech still in stealth, explained to BioSpace in an email. “There are many approaches to slowing and reversing nature’s aging process, and some of those mechanistic insights are being exploited for specific diseases in the clinic today.”
Still, given how much we still don’t know about aging on a fundamental, scientific level, the prudent path remains a disease-centric approach to longevity development, he said, rather than purely prolonging lifespan. “The current smart money is focused on specific diseases related to aging but targeting mechanisms that are aging-related.”
“Sadly, many companies in the pure life extension space are not based on strong science,” Williamson said.
Investors have started paying attention to the longevity space, too. Sergey Jakimov, co-founder and managing partner at LongeVC, told BioSpace in an email that the market opportunity for longevity treatments is “massive,” especially since “extending healthy lifespan even by a few years has enormous social and economic impact.”
PitchBook estimates that longevity biotechs have raised $4.8 billion since 2021—most of which came from just one company: Altos Labs. The company launched in 2022 with $3 billion, which was the largest haul of any biotech in recent years. While not a typical fundraise for a longevity biotech—or any biotech—it brought renewed interest into the space.
Since then, there’s been a low hum of activity from biotechs in the space. In June, Minovia Therapeutics made its way onto the Nasdaq via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) with a value of $180 million.
But now, these companies will have to show their work in the clinic to take the space to the next level, choosing their initial indications wisely.
Perhaps ironically, the abundance of aging-related afflictions is also a big plus for the sector, Jakimov said, at least from an investing perspective. Therapies that address the underlying pathways of growing old can also potentially affect other diseases, he explained, which in turn “creates a very diversified upside.” Jakimov added that the space also enjoys what he calls a “demographic tailwind”—countries worldwide are having to grapple with increasingly aging populations, “driving both need and demand” for longevity interventions.
While the field remains young, Jakimov expects it to move quickly in the coming years. Some companies, he noted, have already initiated animal and even human studies, while others are building up to safety readouts “in the next 12–24 months.”
“We’re likely 3–5 years away from large-scale, definitive trials showing multi-system rejuvenation or lifespan extension in humans,” he told BioSpace. The wait may be shorter yet for what he called “immediate indicators,” such as inflammation, as well as in specific domains like skin aging and frailty.
