- I am a 27-year-old female biotech founder.
I walk into a room,
wearing like a zebra skirt and heels
and like hot pink nails—
like, 'What is this person?'
Hi, my name is Celine Halioua, and I'm a heretic
because I work on dog lifespan extension—
and I believe that the aging process itself is druggable,
and potentially fixable.
Is it heretic or heretic?
- Heretic.
Sweet.
- Let's do it.
- Radicals, dissidents, rebels, and misfits.
You can call them whatever you like,
but what if they're right?
- Perfect. - Thank you.
- That was good for me if it was good for you.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- Awesome. - Cool.
- So nobody questions that I'm working on aging
or developing drugs for lifespan extension;
everyone's like, "But, dogs? Like, why dogs?"
They're like, "Would anybody pay for dogs?"
And then I have to tell them like,
"Yes, there's a market for dogs."
It's a whole thing, right?
- The first question that pops into my head
is just why dogs and not cats?
- Dogs are considered one of the best
models of human aging.
We've co-evolved with dogs,
we've shared an environment with them
for tens of thousands of years,
they develop the same age-late diseases we do
at approximately the same time in our lifespan.
The other really big reason why I decided to work
on explicitly dog lifespan extension
is because if we find a drug
that potentially does extend healthspan
and does extend lifespan,
we could actually see it work
in a relatively short period of time—
unlike people, which, you know, would take decades
or even cats, which would also take decades
considering cats can live to 20+.
- So, one of the things that I find strange
is that life extension is a bit
of a heretical idea to a lot of people.
- Yeah, so it's really interesting, right?
'Cause it really depends how you frame the problem:
nobody questions, obviously,
a drug that you give a cancer patient.
That, of course,
the goal of all these drugs is extending our lifespan—
but it's just at the very, very end of it.
But when you formulate
it as just like, 'We're targeting aging in general,'
or, 'We're targeting, you know, disease in general,'
that's just a much more ambiguous thing;
then it opens up a ton of questions of like,
'Well, is it ethical to extend lifespan?'
Or, 'Does this make sense?'
Or, you know, 'How are we thinking about this problem?'
'Is it natural?'
An age-related disease, by definition, develops over time.
You don't develop an age-related cancer overnight.
You develop it over decades,
but we target these diseases at the very end stage,
when they're the worst.
And of course, it is worthy, and we'll always continue to work
work on drugs for diseases of that stage.
But it is crazy to me that right now—
and the structure in which the incentives are aligned—
encourage and almost mandate us to work
on the hardest stage of that disease.
That is a much, much harder problem than having, you know,
a clump of cancer cells
that are starting to form 20 years before.
So actually, really, all I'm working on
is preventative medicine for age-related diseases.
Instead of waiting for somebody
to develop the disease
and then have to treat them for it, why don't you delay
or reduce their probability to evolve at all?
And honestly, it's actually much more effective
and much better for the patient.
And, relatively speaking, an easier biological problem.
I think there's a number
of assumptions that people have that are incorrect
or at least should be tried.
And I think that's like actually, honestly,
the hardest thing, or one of the hardest things,
about working on a "heretical" idea
is you just have to be okay with that.
If you are working on something so ambitious
and so potentially, like, impactful of how people live,
you will have the people who are really excited about it
and you'll have the people
who are really not excited about it.
And you're always going to have
that really strong dichotomy.
There's not a direct link
between getting something approved for dogs
and getting something approved for humans.
But if we're successful
in getting this first-ever aging approval
through the veterinary FDA,
we can set a precedent for this
at least being, like, somewhat possible, right?
That, like, this isn't as heretical as it might seem.
And if we succeed in that,
we'll hopefully, broadly, enable
the rest of the aging field,
which is really the goal.
'Cause again,
more aging drugs is only better for everyone here.
You must be so sore crouching there.
- Oh, it's alright.
I'm like a catcher.
As soon as my knees are gone, my career's over.
I'll work on that first.
- Yeah. Thank you.