We as a species are living longer.
Right now, the average American lives for about 80 years.
And the question is, how long could we live?
We actually don't know the answer to that.
This question is at the center
of the burgeoning field of longevity science,
and biotech startups believe we are closer than ever
to unprecedented lifespan.
A recent explosion of longevity startups
has created a new speculative industry almost overnight.
Oxford economics estimated longevity
to be worth $7.6 trillion.
In order to reach its potential, right,
really needs to have a way of getting to the market
as fast as we can possibly do it.
[Narrator] But some fear whatever breakthrough may happen
will never really serve the average person.
Rather, it will favor the few who are sinking their fortunes
into these startups.
It's a pretty concentrated group of investors.
From our estimates,
it's like nearly 50% has come from individuals.
That's a nicer way of saying billionaires.
I have to be honest,
a large part is egoistic because the billionaires
they are getting older and they have a lot of money
and they still have a lot of ambitions.
They want to live longer when they age better.
When people think about longevity,
the thing that comes to mind is usually, you know,
some eccentric billionaire trying to live forever.
But what longevity really is
is just the science of helping us live longer.
And also the science of helping us live more healthfully.
Anything that comes out of this space
won't be just for the rich.
Humans have been trying to cheat death
since we climbed down from the trees.
The Fountain of Youth was a mythical place
where you could drink waters from its springs
to rejuvenate your aging body.
It first appeared in writing around the fifth century BC
and the search hasn't stopped since.
Folklore has it that Spanish Explorer Ponce de Leon searched
in vain for magical waters with restorative powers
in modern day Florida and The Bahamas.
But historians agree that most of his time
was actually spent searching
for something a bit more earthly.
Not only was he searching for gold,
but expeditions like his were expensive and in constant need
of fundraising from the throne across the Atlantic.
Today, the modern quest for prolonged youth
remains very expensive.
Last year, more than $2 billion in venture funding
went into the longevity space.
So this is a space that people are excited about
and they are putting their money into it.
But this expedition is funded mostly
by a different sort of royalty.
We have heard recently, you know, that famous people,
such as Jeff Bezos invested, not only millions,
but actually billions into new startup companies.
And I think you know,
it is totally justified this investment.
While this narrative of this super rich
making an elixir of life for themselves at the expense
of the rest of the world world makes
for good Bond villain material,
it doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.
I love it.
The narrative about lots of billionaires
coming into this longevity space,
it's played up more than it needs to be because in general,
like VC funds are backed by billionaires
or families of billionaires.
This is sort of the artery
of the the worldwide innovation economy
is people who have the capital on hand to be able
to do these big, sometimes risky, investments.
I don't think that impression is entirely wrong
but it's also not fully correct.
And it really fails to recognize the ways in which
the edges of human knowledge and capacity
are always explored on the outskirts
by a handful of individuals
who are uniquely motivated and uniquely resourced.
It never happens with technology that somehow that
that then stays secretive
and closed up in a box and only effective for them.
As it turns out the science of pharmacology
and even the basic laws of supply and demand
don't really allow for an elite super drug.
That first pill that you create or that first injection
or whatever it is that might cost, you know,
$500 million to make that first pill.
The second one probably cost a fraction of a penny.
And so if you were to do the math
of like the supply and demand aspects of this,
it doesn't make sense to make a really expensive medicine
that only a few billionaires take
when you can make something really cheap
but make it for everybody.
And there's another reason
why private billionaires and VC's are flooding this space.
As it turns out, longevity health doesn't exactly fit
into the current healthcare model
making it risky and more complicated
to traditional pharmaceutical investors.
The major regulatory bodies that look at states
of disease, so the CDC, the FDA,
they don't consider death an illness.
Of all of the clinical endpoints that we generally look at
therapeutics alleviating the suffering of humans,
interestingly, death isn't one of them.
Many people, very accurately,
particularly as we live longer and healthier lives,
are pausing and saying, well, wait,
why do I wait to get involved
with the healthcare system until I'm sick?
And why is there no baseline of what being healthy is?
There have been a lot of people with resources,
i.e. billionaires, who are saying,
I know the best practices for living long and healthy lives
but what are the treatments to alleviate some
of these symptoms of aging?
And all the classic investors in the space said,
I don't really know how to fathom that.
I don't know what to do
with these kind of soft clinical endpoints.
And I absolutely don't know how to invest on the metric
of you make an investment today,
you engage with a therapeutic practice,
and then hopefully we find out in 50 years
that you lived 10 healthier years
than you might have otherwise, right?
That feedback loop is way too long.
And that's really what's enabled investors like ourselves
to start participating in this market.
What's more, longevity science itself
challenges much of the healthcare status quo as we know it.
Everyone in the space agrees that for real longevity
to be achieved, there needs to be a massive paradigm shift.
We are locked into a system where we wait
for people to get sick and then try to treat them.
And that system worked really well a hundred years ago
when infectious diseases
were the cause of death for everybody.
If you come in with a heart attack
or with stage three cancer
or with early stage Alzheimer's disease,
so much has already broken down in our bodies
by the time that that doctor is seeing that patient
that it is so complex to imagine how we would fix all
of the pieces that have come apart.
All of these future technologies, these future medicines,
they're built around this idea of prevention.
The notion that we could switch from a healthcare system
that is primarily reactive, wait for someone to get sick,
to one that is more proactive, right?
Give someone a drug so that they could then stay healthy.
So a more technically accurate term for a longevity drug
would be a multi-disease preventative,
something that can keep you from getting cancer
or Alzheimer's disease or having a heart attack.
The amazing potential of this science
is that we could have a single drug
that makes all of those things happen
further in the future than they would otherwise have.
As of today, a single longevity drug remains
as real as the Fountain of Youth and experts agree
that regardless of the technology,
longevity is a multi-pronged effort using everything
from biomarkers and cellular rejuvenation to gene editing,
diet, and exercise.
There will likely never be a one-size-fits-all solution.
And to accomplish this
longevity startups are taking an interdisciplinary approach
to the science.
Scientists have really started breaking down all
of the little things that happen to us as we age.
And there are a lot of them,
but I like to break them down into three categories.
Our top category is stuff that happens
at the whole tissue level.
We call it like changes in how our tissues are put together.
We have stem cells that get exhausted as we age
and now they can't make new copies of themselves.
And then if you zoom in into the cell,
there are changes that happen at the molecular level,
specific molecules that can't be broken down
by our normal recycling mechanisms that build up
little by little as we get older.
The business model of these startups
largely mirror this diverse approach, casting a wide net
across both academic science and pharmacology.
It's kind of a new model
where you don't focus on one single technology
or one single therapeutic area
because longevity is a very complex approach
where many biological mechanisms
are interacted and intertwined.
So we'd like to have the scientists interacting
with each other
even though they have a specific scientific fields.
We have like an incubator space.
We bring in a cutting-edge science.
We collaborate with academic leaders in the field
and we bring in scientific entrepreneurs
to bring this breakthrough science into our labs
here in Zurich.
So we have labs and offices
and then we have very experienced traditional pharma.
People who know how to discover and develop drugs
in this completely novel field.
Where we find a great scientist
who has made a great discovery, bring it into Cambrian,
and then use the fact that we have a team of chemists
and drug developers and researchers, and you know,
people who understand the biotech market and all of this
to foster that internally.
This aggregation model helps biotechs
hedge their bets against an admittedly high-risk venture.
Drug development is risky, right?
So when you start a drug in clinical trials or human trials,
you only have about a one in seven chance of that drug
making it all the way through.
It's three phases of clinical trials to approval.
But if you pull together 20 of these different ideas
into one entity and resource them all,
then all of a sudden that risk goes up to about a 95% chance
that you'll get at least one hit.
And so the math of drug development makes a lot more sense
as a collective than as individuals.
Even with so many bets on the table,
there's no guarantee that a breakthrough will happen
under their roof.
Recently, a study funded through traditional grants
out of the Salk Institute successfully extended
the lifespan of mice.
And while mouse studies are not
considered breakthrough discoveries,
it has gotten the attention of the scientific community.
We developed an approach called partial reprogramming.
Basically where we express a set of genes
which can actually reprogram the cells
without losing their identity.
We were able to erase the signs of aging.
We were able to extend its life by 30% almost.
So basically this kind of demonstrates
that partial programming, there is a way to rework some
of the aging marks in cells and tissues
and which can eventually have a beneficial effect
on the whole organism.
The partial program approach was even tested in human cells.
So we were able to reword, take cells
from an aged individual and apply these partial programming
and erase these signs of aging in the cells.
So the conceptually, it works even in human cells.
The keyword here is conceptually.
The science is in such early stages
and it grows every day.
What we have is all of these really interesting data points,
right, from human studies from mouse studies
but we're many, many years, if not decades away
from concrete answers that tell us how
these things contribute to how we age.
And this speaks to another misconception
about longevity.
This community as a whole, isn't so much focused
on increasing our lifespan as much as they are
on improving our quality of life as we age.
It's not our aim and I don't think anyone
can prevent death, right?
Ultimately we will still all die,
but our aim is that until we die,
that we have the best life that we can have.
In the longevity world,
almost nobody's talking about lifespan.
They're all talking about health span,
the amount of time that we spend in good health.
And if we prioritize expanding health span,
increasing lifespan may be a side effect of that.