Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel can buy whatever they want — even eternal youth?
Tech billionaires are pouring massive amounts of their fortune into the bitter battle to be the best Benjamin Button, propelling the market for life-extending therapeutics into a $25 billion business.
OpenAI CEO Altman, 39, and Amazon founder Bezos, 60, have shelled out millions in recent years to longevity labs Retro Biosciences and Altos Labs, respectively. PayPal cofounder Thiel, 57, forked over $1 million to the Methuselah Foundation, a biomedical charity that aims to make 90 the new 50 by 2030.
But the road to reprogramming cells and manipulating genes is not paved with gold. Anti-aging aficionados face regulatory hurdles, ethical questions and long-term funding concerns, among other challenges, in the race to keeping the Grim Reaper at bay.
“We fail small and early and fast, and our goal is to get a return on our mission,” Methuselah co-founder and CEO David Gobel told The Post. “Our mission is lives saved as opposed to dollars made.”
The future of longevity
Gobel, a serial entrepreneur, began Methuselah in 2001 after asking himself one question as he neared 50 years old — “What’s the most important thing I can do, make more money or make more health?”
The non-profit counts Thiel among its early champions. More recently, records show that Vitalik Buterin — the 30-year-old Ethereum co-founder, who earned the title of world’s youngest crypto billionaire — contributed more than $13.6 million in 2021.
“We haven’t actually solicited for donations since maybe 2013,” said Gobel, 72. “I hate begging, and I figured that we needed to earn our way forward by results.”
Methuselah boasts nine companies in its portfolio. One of them, Leucadia Therapeutics, developed a device to restore the flow of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain and drain toxins that may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
Another, X-Therma, is focused on using its subzero technology to preserve organs for over 72 hours and transport them across the Atlantic Ocean for better transplant availability.
Methuselah also partnered with NASA on a competition to identify ways to grow human tissue in a lab and a challenge to figure out how to feed astronauts on extended space missions.
Bone marrow rejuvenation, which involves replacing dysfunctional bone marrow cells with healthy, young ones, is one human advancement Gobel would really like to see in his lifetime.
“If you can rejuvenate the bone marrow, you can rejuvenate anything,” he said. “And if you can rejuvenate the blood, then the downstream effects are almost certain to be profoundly good.”
When will these inventions become available?
Gobel said expensive and time-consuming regulatory hurdles are the major obstacle to getting innovations to market.
“[A] software company can get a really amazing product out the door without much regulation for $5 million, and then it sinks or swims in the marketplace,” Gobel said. “For a biotech, you’re talking $1 billion and 12 to 15 years — and that money has to come from some place.”
A new drug or medical device has long required laboratory studies, animal testing and human clinical trials to make sure it’s safe. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviews data to decide if the drug or device should be approved and continues to monitor the product’s safety after it becomes available to the public.
On average, the FDA takes around 12 years to approve a new drug and three to seven years to OK a medical device.
This process could hasten with the FDA shifting away from animal testing to screen new medicines. Gobel applauds the move to “more modern methods,” but notes that the agency hasn’t updated its regulations to allow for the use of animal-free models.
The FDA also hasn’t approved any drugs or therapies specifically for treating aging. The agency doesn’t consider aging to be a disease, but rather, a natural process.
So don’t expect a life-extending pill any time soon — Gobel thinks there could be something even bigger.
“I think the next 20 years, there isn’t going to be a pill. Who knows after that?” Gobel said. “What I could imagine one day is that you get into a ‘Star Trek’ teleportation pod and it just remodels you. So I would say that would happen the earliest, 2060.”
The ethical questions
There are several ways private companies are trying to delay death. Bezos-backed Altos Labs launched in 2022 with the aim of reversing aging by rejuvenating cells.
Retro Biosciences, meanwhile, emerged that year with a focus on cellular reprogramming and plasma-inspired therapeutics to add 10 “good” years to your life. Altman reportedly invested $180 million.
This 2020s boom in biotech start-ups has sparked cutting-edge research — and ethical dilemmas.
Dr. Joshua Chodosh, director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Palliative Care at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said a major issue facing the longevity field is, “Who do we study and when do we intervene?”
“We know that there are certain therapeutics that might be helpful in someone who’s much older but potentially harmful in someone who’s much younger,” Chodosh told The Post.
Another challenge is that researchers focus on a single disease and a single organ because that’s how the FDA approves drugs.
“And yet, when we think about healthspan … we know that it’s not just a single organ,” Chodosh said, referring to the number of years people can expect to live in good health. “It’s much more integrated than that, through multiple, or even potentially all organs in the entire human body.”
Some researchers have speculated that despite medical advances, our biggest life expectancy gains may be in the rearview mirror. The average life expectancy in the US was 77.5 years in 2022, and it’s only predicted to modestly increase over the next three decades even amid the global hunt for an aging antidote.
Chodosh said it’s important to address environmental conditions, like pollution, poor diets, sedentary lifestyles and sleeplessness, to live longer, healthier lives.
“I think that a lot of our longevity success has been through environmental improvements [and] better safety,” Chodosh said.
“When you look at data on lifespan and death, some of that is obviously influenced [by] what perturbations or challenges there are in the community that don’t necessarily have as much to do with the individuals and their own particular health states.”
