There are around 160 to 170 anti-aging companies focused on creating solutions! That’s the good news.
The bad news? About two dozen of them are publicly traded and almost all have declined significantly in value since their IPO. The rest remain privately held. The historical track record of investing in anti-aging companies is quite poor!
That said, with the vastly increased technical capabilities of modern science, there is tremendous potential going forward. Will some of these emerging companies overcome the aging processes and enable greater healthspan and longevity for humanity? Let’s take a look at some of the more notable ones.
Super-Wealthy Funded Anti-Aging Companies
It turns out that the super-wealthy are interested in owning more than just the top media companies in the world. As they begin to see signs of their mortality, they fund new anti-aging companies as well. As a few examples:
In 2013, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Calico Labs (@calico). Craig Venter and Peter Diamandis created Human Longevity.
In 2016, British billionaire Jim Mellon launched Juvenescence and AgeX Therapeutics (@agexthera). Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel funded Unity Biotechnology.
In 2017, David Sinclair and others started Life Biosciences, funded by wealthy individuals including WeWork’s Adam Neumann.
Each of these ventures struggled, both financially and in retaining their top scientists. Calico has no pipeline of candidate solutions. Human Longevity’s founders departed and the company evolved into a very good, but small scale full body testing medical center. Juvenescence has tried to IPO for several years. Many of their acquisitions have failed to make breakthroughs. AgeX is publicly traded below $1/share, underfunded and not making much progress. Unity’s lead clinical trial failed. Life Biosciences has yet to launch a clinical trial, although they raised $82MM in 1H, 2022 with plans for a trial in 2H, 2023. On the positive side, they found a way to restore vision in old mice.
Funding from the super-wealthy has not yet been a good indicator for human success. However, this will not stop the rich and powerful from continuing to try.
New Super-Wealthy Anti-Aging Companies
From 2021-2022, there is another cycle of new anti-aging companies funded by the super wealthy. Most are focused on rejuvenation via Induced Tissue Response (#iTR). Once again they are paying top dollar to acquire prestigious scientists. These anti-aging companies include:
- Altos Labs (@AltosLabs)
- Launched in 2022 with $3B in funding from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.
- Led by Hal Barron, former head of Calico.
- Paying million-dollar salaries to recruit top talent.
- Hired an all-star team of scientists including Shinya Yamanaka, Wolf Reik and Peter Walter as well as former Life Biosciences luminaries Steve Horvath, Manuel Serrano and Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte.
- Pursuing rejuvenation solutions using labs in SF, the UK and Japan.
- There is significant skepticism on whether epigenetic cellular reprogramming can succeed in safely increasing healthspan and lifespan.
- Cambrian Biosciences
- NewLimit (@newlimit)
- Launched in 2022 with $105MM in funding from Coinbase billionaire Brian Armstrong who is the co-founder. He plans to add more funding as needed.
- Scientists include Alex Marson and Mark Davis.
- Retro Bioscience
- Launched in 2022 with $180MM in funding from secret investors.
- Bay Area company led by Joe Betts-Lacroix with expert advisors including Jeff Kindler (CEO, Pfizer), Vadim Gladyshev and Kristen Fortney.
- Plans to use cellular reprogramming, senescence and plasma-derived therapies.
Anti-Aging Company Contenders
Will the high-priced all-star teams succeed or will smaller funded, but established and practical competitors beat them to market? Here are a few intriguing contenders, among many.
- BioAge Labs
- Launched in 2015 and led by Kristen Fortney and Eric Morgen.
- Have raised $127MM to fund initial clinical trials.
- Pipeline focused on multi-omic solutions for muscle-aging and the aging immune system.
- A COVID-focused Phase 1 trial concluded in 1H, 2022. Results were not been published.
- Current focus is on initiating a Phase 2 trials on raising apelin protein levels in aged obese adults for reducing muscle atrophy, improved muscle repair, increased energy and increasing grip strength.
- Oral and IV formulations.
- Shift Bioscience (@ShiftBioscience)
- Launched in 2017. Multiple rounds of seed funding.
- Machine learning framework to understand causes of cellular rejuvenation by analyzing genes.
- Developed biological aging clock AltumAge, which incorporates age acceleration for certain pathologies such as cancer to increase accuracy.
- Turn.Bio (@turn_bio)
- Launched in 2019. Undisclosed funding amounts.
- Develops mRNA medicines that induce the body to heal itself by instructing specific cells to fight disease or repair damaged tissue. Focused on reprogramming the epigenome – a network of chemical compounds and proteins that control cell functions by influencing which genes are active – to restore capabilities that are often lost with age.
- ERA(™) platform to develop tailored therapies for age-related diseases.
- Pipeline includes preclinical treatments for skin, eyes, muscles, osteoarthritis and cartilage.
17 Intriguing Early Stage Healthspan Extension Companies
The following companies have intriguing potential solutions to extend your healthspan and lifespan. They are raising funding in 2024. Hopefully they get it. If successful, these solutions are at least several years away from general availability. Stay healthy until then!
- Beyond Barrier Therapeutics — Primary focus is treating concussions, where there is no FDA approved therapeutic. Glutathione (GSH) levels in the brain decrease after a head trauma as well as with aging. The drop in GSH is believed to be linked with both acute and chronic indications of the central nervous system. Beyond Barriers Therapeutics is developing an intranasally delivered, repurposed drug to reduce inflammation and oxidative stress in the brain by increasing GSH levels.
- Bloom Science — Bloom focuses on the multidirectional communication between the gut microbiome and the central nervous system. Bloom’s discovery platform seeks to develop synthetic gut commensal microbes to treat neurologic and metabolic disorders.
- Cosmica Biosciences — Provide a Personalized Aging Prediction blood test using simulated microgravity to accelerate the aging of your blood sample. This can identify mechanisms that will trigger future your biological aging. Cosmica then shares a personalized, actionable plan to combat your future biological aging before it happens.
- Cyclarity — Develops simple and direct interventions targeting toxic forms of cholesterol, using rationally designed molecules, to provide the first true disease-modifying treatments for age-related diseases such as atherosclerosis, hypercholesterolemia, heart failure, and macular degeneration. Their research has combined computational and synthetic chemistry programs to create custom-engineered cyclodextrins (polysaccharides with known industrial and pharmaceutical excipient uses) to capture, and remove from cells, oxidized cholesterol derivatives such as 7-ketocholesterol, which are broadly toxic molecules with no known biological function.
- Fauna Bio — Hibernators have optimized many aspects of longevity and resist and reverse numerous disease pathologies related to diseases of aging. In addition to that, hibernators can reactivate fetal genetic programs to repair tissue cellular damage. Based on their work on hibernating animals, Fauna Bio has created the first biomedical knowledge graph that harmoniously fuses human patient data with animal disease resistance profiles. Using a comparative genomics approach that unlocks novel treatment mechanisms from extreme animal physiology they seek to find drugs that mimic natural protective processes. Fauna is led by longevity expert Ashley Zehnder.
- ImmuneAge — Drug discovery platform company focused on immune system rejuvenation. ImmuneAGE rejuvenates hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) from the bone marrow based on a geroscience screening platform enabled by a new ‘StemSupply’ method achieving >1000x expansion of HSCs.
- Invictus BioPharm — Protein Aggregation and neuroinflammation are hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases. Studies have shown that modest reduction of temperature prevents disease-related protein aggregation and neurodegeneration. Invictus drug formulation produces a sustained drop in core body temperature.
- Matter Bio — Focused on preserving genome integrity. As we age, our genome is constantly being damaged by exogenous and endogenous sources. Occasionally errors are missed and incorporated into the DNA in the form of mutations, structural variations, epigenetic drift, and other types of information loss. Matter Bio has assembled a world-class team of scientists and executives to help counter this critical information loss in the genome. To achieve this, they are focusing on a number of assets that address key stages in the genomic information loss continuum.
- Oviva Therapeutics — Led by longevity expert Daisy Robinton, Oviva is developing first-in-class therapeutics to improve ovarian function and consequently extend female healthspan. Age-related decline in ovarian function leads to adverse health outcomes in women across the board. Oviva aims to extend healthspan in women through developing novel therapeutics that target ovarian function and longevity.
- Qu Biologics — Decline in innate immunity underlies aging, leading to chronic inflammation, cancer, infections, and metabolic disease, and acceleration of the aging process. Qu’s transformative immunomodulation platform ‘trains’ innate immunity to reverse this decline, with demonstrated proof of principle of this novel mechanism in four Phase 2 clinical trials and excellent safety in over 360 participants treated. Qu’s platform downregulates the mTOR pathway, seeking to restore health-supportive mechanisms.
- R3 Bio — Full body replacement is a decades-old proposal to cure aging, by using cloned brainless bodies for spare parts. The team contends that all fundamental breakthroughs to do this are in place today, although the technical challenge remains tremendous. (e.g. Cloning, CRISPR, nerve reconnection surgeries, natural brainless bodies and their use in organ replacement). The team is starting by arranging life saving transplants from natural human donor bodies. They have already started on their next step as well, building foundational technology to create non-human primate donor bodies.
- Rasayana Therapeutics — Rasayana aims to develop medicines across broad therapeutics areas and become a leader in gut permeability biology. Novel, safe anti-inflammaging therapeutics have the potential to extend health lifespan and revolutionize treatment for aging. LPS-TLR4-induced damage is an established upstream driver of inflammaging causing whole body metabolic dysfunction. Increased intestinal permeability due to age-associated microbial dysbiosis is an established cause of inflammaging. Rasayana’s lead program has demonstrated strong efficacy in reversing microbial dysbiosis, intestinal permeability and inflammation. Their lead program is a novel treatment targeting the two major hallmarks of aging: inflammaging and gut dysbiosis.
- Rejuve Bio — By analyzing data from long-lived Methuselah Flies, a specially bred animal model, and integrating it with human health and omics data, Rejuve.Bio uncovers genetic pathways and common mechanisms that contribute to longevity and aging-related diseases. They seek to develop targeted therapeutics that can extend healthspan and mitigate age-related conditions.
- Repair Bio — Human cells cannot degrade cholesterol, leading to abnormal accumulation of excess cholesterol in vital organs and the onset and progression of several chronic and orphan diseases. Repair Biotechnologies’ Cholesterol Degrading Platform (CDP) therapy solves this by providing specific cells with the ability to degrade excess or modified cholesterol. To date, there are no other therapies that can significantly reverse plaque size and overall plaque burden , a reliable predictor of cardiovascular events and poor outcomes.
- Rethink64 — Healthy intercellular communication is key to propagation of youthful or therapeutic molecules in a tissue. Current approaches to influence this signaling rely on endogenous pathways for communication and thus face challenges impacting the distribution. reThink64’s first in class “Router” constructs create their own network of channels with and in between cells once inside a tissue. They establish a brand new paradigm to affect distribution of endogenous molecules as well as introduce exogenous ones.
- Rudiment Medicine — There are numerous skin anti-aging products on the market, some have superficial benefit, while the majority are false claims. Currently, there is no product available to truly reverse skin aging or bringing significant benefits to customers. In addition, there are no personalized skin testing and treatment plan to inform customers about their skin condition, age, and proposed treatment. Rudiment Medicine is developing two products. One is a personalized skin age testing kit (already filed for IP protection) which combines 57 scientific parameters that can accurately assess skin quality and age. The other product is a skin anti-aging cream that will be formulated with small molecules that target aging associated with genetics and epigenetics.
- StemCardia — Developing therapies to repair and strengthen the heart. No curative treatments are available for chronic heart failure, the leading cause of death. The heart does not regenerate itself, inspiring their cardiomyocyte product composed of human Pluripotent Stem Cell (PSC) derived heart muscle cells that durably engraft and function. They also are working on anti-arrhythmia technology using marketed channel blockers and a gene-modification approach.
Anti-Aging Companies Conclusion
Hopefully, many of these companies become successful. However, there is no single panacea for aging. Anti-aging medical solutions require addressing many of the 24 Key Health Factors for 2024. Individual drugs and medical treatments cannot address all of them as comprehensive solutions are required. A deep level of collaboration across multiple companies and multiple modalities will be needed. It will be interesting to see which companies emerge to take this role once further progress is made.
Thanks for taking time to read this article and care about your health. As your reward, we leave you with this Will Rogers line, “We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.”