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Funding for aging research and the development of therapies to treat aging as a medical condition used to be hard to come by. It was a fringe field of medicine. But slow years of bootstrapping incremental progress – hard work, patient advocacy, and philanthropy – eventually led to technology demonstrations, such as the rejuvenation of mice with senolytic therapies, that convinced the first large sources of funding to enter the field. That produced further progress, and the start of a longevity industry, enough to convince deeper pockets to participate. That in turn made slowing and reversing aging a viable investment for a growing number of sizable sources of wealth.
History teaches to be cautious about newly announced large investments in the field of aging and longevity, however. Calico launched with much fanfare, hundreds of millions of Google’s dollars devoted to aging research, but a decade on it seems clear that little will result from this initiative. We might look at Altos Labs, recently launched with $3 billion in funding, as a newer Calico, but with the narrow goal of achieving human rejuvenation via cell reprogramming technologies. Will a narrow focus allow success where a broad focus leads to an organization losing its way? Only time will tell.
So to today’s topic, the Hevolution Foundation, which has broadly announced intentions to funnel very large amounts of Saudia Arabian sovereign wealth into aging research and the longevity industry. The organization has started slowly, but we can ask the same sorts of questions as of other large intiatives: will meaningful projects be funded? Much of the longevity industry, and much of aging research, is focused on goals that cannot and will not make much of a difference to the healthy human life span, such as the prevalent calorie restriction mimetics, supplements, and approaches to cellular stress response upregulation. Many of the large investment funds have devoted much of their funding to date to aging-branded efforts that are really just business as usual in medicine and biotech, nothing that offers the possibility to significantly change the shape of a human life.
The most important battle today, with regard to human aging, is over steering funding to projects that are more likely rather than less likely to result in significant rejuvenation. Senolytics, not calorie restriction. Partial reprogramming, not more supplements. And so forth. Until the broad scope of aging research and the longevity industry is significantly focused on rejuvenation, it is hard to be more than cautiously optimistic about any new large-scale venture, no matter how good their rhetoric sounds at the outset.
Hevolution CEO on how to spend $1 billion a year on longevity
“First of all, we are very much about extending healthy life, not just lifespan. I think if you ask anybody, with rare exception, they don’t want to live longer for the sake of living longer. ‘For the benefit of all’ means not only being all-inclusive, but how do you democratise these technologies and discoveries? If we can’t scale and democratise discoveries, and how to maximise the impact, then we should question ourselves: why are we doing this? Number one, we need to provide and support the development of the scientific field,” says Hevolution’s CEO Dr Mehmood Khan, who bemoans the huge gap in funding from governments around the world that goes into aging research compared to diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease (most of which are the consequences of aging). There’s a log scale, if not two log scales, difference between the funding that goes into understanding how to keep people healthy on a biological level, versus treating the consequences of it. And that gap needs to be filled.”
Another challenge that Khan sees is that most of the funding that is currently available for aging research is very much siloed, both within countries but also within disciplines. “One institute will fund the biology, and another will fund clinical research – it is not integrated together, for a whole variety of reasons. And that all needs to change. The irony is that the largest part of the healthcare budget for all developed countries is age-related diseases. So, we’re already paying for the consequences of this … and it’s only getting bigger because our populations are aging.”
When setting up Hevolution, Khan strongly felt that, to achieve all of this with the right incentives, the organisation had to be a non-profit. “If we were mandated as a for-profit organisation, then it’s going to all be about return on investment back to our investors, and funders, which changes the types of decisions you’ll make. To avoid this, you have to create a non-profit organisation, where the mission implementation is about funding science, which has no strings attached. We’re not looking for an equity stake or anything like that – just fund the science, regardless of geographic location, for the benefit of all.”
“Our vision is that we can invest up to a billion dollars a year, but the question now is how do we get there? The rate-limiting step in this is not the ability to invest or provide scientific research funding, but how to do that responsibly, such that the field can absorb it. This field needs to grow, and part of that is creating a pipeline of good scientific ideas, a pipeline of talent, and then pull that through into where venture comes in and build companies and then grow those companies. Some are already along that spectrum, but the funnel is not large enough, the pipeline is not large enough. So we’re starting by funding science but we’ll also be announcing our first investments very soon.” Khan says that Hevolution’s research funding and venture capital investment approaches will run in parallel, although how much of that $1 billion budget is allocated to each is not yet determined.