The longevity economy is multi-faceted, with a range of investment opportunities available that can impact longevity in different ways. Greg Winterton spoke to Sergey Jakimov, Founding Partner of venture capital firm LongeVC, to get his views on both the space overall, and how LongeVC sees it, and therefore, approaches it.
GW: Sergey, let’s kick off with this: How does LongeVC actually define longevity? After all, you could make the argument that better urban design contributes to better longevity, but most would say that is real estate investing.
SJ: It’s probably an over-used term but for us, it means a convergence of different types of technology, from traditional biotech to less traditional generative medicine; it’s the confluence of AI, engineering and healthcare, working together to prolong health span. As an investor, there are two approaches to longevity; one is to defeat aging, and the other is to defeat diseases. We’re in the second camp; health span should trigger ‘joy span’. At the end of the day, you want to have a life that is worth living so that you want to live longer.
GW: What qualities make a company a strong candidate for a longevity-focused investment?
SJ: Focus makes a good longevity company. There was something of a graveyard of capital 2019/2020 – when a lot of the talk was about fighting aging – because these companies never ended up with a therapy because they didn’t have a disease target. Fortunately, right now, you have a fairly consistent playbook of what it takes to arrive at patient outcomes in biotech. You need a disease indication so that you can design endpoints. You create success stories but then you need to be able to show accessible language. To lure more participants in, the longevity industry needs to start speaking the language of the capital providers – a ‘here’s how you can make money’ mindset.
GW: What areas of longevity do you believe are overhyped right now and why?
SJ: I’d say maybe reprogramming is a bit overhyped at the moment. You have these examples of technologies that have raised capital at tremendous valuations but that have still not delivered anything substantially; the investment case is more based on promise as opposed to interim data that is translatable to an investment case. Epigenetics and senolytics are probably as well. Getting rid of senescent cells may yield some results and improve overall well-being but the focus should be on disease-specific senescent cells. To be clear, I’m not saying that there is no applicability and promise in both of these areas; just that from an investment case perspective, I’m not sure either of these is quite there at the moment.
GW: Within the various sub-categories of longevity, what are one or two that are showing most promise in terms of being able to deliver sustainable companies?
SJ: It’s funny because it’s probably the two I mentioned that are over-hyped at the moment. In epigenetic reprogramming, it could be a case that for progress to be made, the first companies might have to die for the second companies to succeed; the latter takes the learnings from the first ones and improves on them, tightens the focus. Same with senescence. Once we figure out how to go after disease-related senescent-like cells, the frontier opens up.
GW: What role do you see policy and regulation playing in shaping the longevity market?
SJ: It is actually not very hard to understand the regulatory environment in biotech. It’s the same for everyone who is going after demonstrating results in living human beings; there is pre-clinical, an IND application, post clinical, etc. Agencies like the FDA are there because you need safety guardrails. I don’t think the regulatory landscape is as bad or complicated as people in the longevity field try to frame it. It‘s actually really easy; if you can demonstrate patient outcomes and understand and limit side effects, that’s a big piece of it for regulators.
What I would say on the policy side, though, is that in the US, grant cutting will have an impact. The funding cut made more spin-offs and more early-stage VCs become a greater share of the capital sources. That’s good because they have more ability to become an earlier-stage investor in a promising piece of science, and the supply of companies has grown as they need to source funding from somewhere other than the government. But the science is less mature as a result.
GW: Lastly, Sergey, what does the longevity investment landscape look like in 10 – 20 years and are there any adjacent fields (AI, robotics, space, etc.) that you think will increasingly intersect with longevity?
SJ: The answer is that I don’t know. In biotech, what is going to matter is the fusion of AI and robotics, where AI designs something and the result is fed into the AI to reinforce and learn from the outcomes, and then continue in the iterative loop. This is being done already and in 10 years a significant portion of drug discovery is going to be done this way.
And then, I think regenerative therapeutics will take their place in the whole spectrum of treatments. I think it’s still going to be age-related diseases. I wish I could say we’ll be into cryonics! But we need to crack age related diseases, maybe come up with how to use regenerative therapeutics to reduce chronic conditions. These treatments could provide tremendous relief to healthcare systems.
Sergey Jakimov is Founding Partner at LongeVC