Fight Aging!

James Peyer was involved in the aging-focused fund Apollo Ventures before he moved on to the more recent venture industry initiative that evolved into Cambrian Biopharma. Cambrian is arguably even more focused on creating new biotech startups to treat aging, rather than investing in existing companies, than is the case for Apollo. Many venture capitalists are coming to the conclusion that the pace at which new biotech companies in this space are arising is too slow to provide sufficient opportunities for the capital that could be harnessed to produced progress. That pace must thus be accelerated.

Peyer is a regular on the conference circuit, and can be relied upon to give interesting, thoughtful presentations on the state of the science, the state of the funding, and what the venture community should do next in order to best support the growth of the longevity industry. You can find many of his talks on YouTube, and I recommend looking them over if you would like a sense of what the venture side of the longevity industry is thinking.

Q&A with Cambrian Biopharma's CEO - hallmarks of aging and classifying aging as a disease.

We wondered what Dr Peyer's views were on classifying aging itself as a disease? "I have a somewhat controversial view on this amongst folks in our field," says Dr Peyer. "I believe that the entire discussion about whether aging should be considered a disease is actually little more than a distraction from the real, more technical issues standing in the way of getting a medicine that enhances healthspan from being approved for that use. Many of my colleagues advocate in good faith that this would be a key inflection point for the field, and I used to believe the same. However, the more I have come to understand about the way that these drugs would be regulated in the future, the less concerned that I am with worrying about categorizing aging as a disease."

"I do absolutely think that it is appropriate and proper to classify the build-up of damage that accumulates during aging as a disease. There is already a gray area about when other conditions are labeled a pathology vs not a pathology. We have categorizations for pre-diabetes, mild cognitive impairment, benign tumors, and high cholesterol. Are these conditions diseases? I would argue that it's not important what we call it. What is important is the following: (A) Can we run a clinical trial to address the condition and (B) would health insurance companies provide such a medicine to its patients?"

"One of the most valuable learnings from the pioneering work of Nir Barzilai on the TAME trial and other conversations with the FDA has been that building a composite chronic disease endpoint is already acceptable to the FDA. Building a drug that reduces stroke and heart disease risk (what the statins were approved for) has been acceptable to the FDA for ~20 years. Building a drug that reduces heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, cancer, and diabetes risk is also acceptable. What would change in this context if the regulators labeled aging a disease? Nothing. We just have to do the trial to show that such a drug is actually working. The path is already there for us. The real challenge is how we design and power these trials and whether we can use biomarker-based endpoints to make the iteration time of testing these medicines shorter."