Fight Aging!

The longevity industry will at some point diffuse into the broader pharmaceutical and biotech industries. It will cease to be so distinct in culture, technology, and regulation as to merit the drawing of firm lines. Treating aging as a medical condition is no longer looked upon as strange by the powers that be, even though the public at large has yet to catch up entirely to this new viewpoint. This relatively new environment of approval means that sizable funding is available, and indeed deployed in large amounts to advance the cause, both by private and public sources.

One of the US government programs in which program managers have become very sympathetic to the cause of treating aging is ARPA-H, portions of which one might think of as spiritual successors to the attitudes and aims of DARPA, except that the focus is progress in medical technology specifically. That clinical trials are so enormously expensive to prepare for and run is the fault of government regulatory bodies, a mess created over decades. Now another arm of government will feed public funds into that process to enable more groups to make progress in passing the financial hurdle that regulators created. As is usually the case, however, it is largely the already well funded, high-profile initiatives that receive that assistance; if one is connected enough to have a large chance of obtaining major government funding, one is connected enough to be able to raise just as much from private sources, and have probably already done so.

Regardless, medicine is a highly regulated industry, and this is how the game is played in any industry in which government appointees exert such a large degree of control over what does and does not happen. In these years in which the first therapies that might slow aging (or in a few cases selectively reverse aging) are making their way into clinical trials, most groups are indeed trying to play the game as it exists, with all of its flaws, as in the bigger picture it is vital to demonstrate to the world at large that the treatment of aging can be real. An increasing number of companies are looking for alternative paths, however, such as those setting up their initial clinical trials in much less costly locations, and intending to initially prove their worth and provide access via medical tourism. From a very high level perspective, the most important outcome for the next decade or two is that therapies for aging, as many different approaches as possible, are meaningfully tested in humans - however that outcome is achieved. Even a few successes will give rise to a massively larger industry, with enough weight behind it to meaningfully change the way in which medical development takes place.

ARPA-H pours millions into healthspan-focused human trials

The US Government, via its Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) initiative, is putting up to $144 million into multiple projects aimed at extending healthspan - the years people live in good health. Through its PROSPR program, ARPA-H is funding seven research teams working to treat aging as a tractable biological process, and proving, in humans, that intervening earlier can help people stay healthier for longer.

Short for "Proactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience," PROSPR's goal is to overcome one of the key challenges that has limited clinical development in geroscience: aging is slow, and its associated diseases and conditions can take years or decades to emerge, making conventional trials unwieldy and expensive. The initiative aims to use longitudinal human data to identify early, actionable biomarkers that respond before late-stage outcomes appear. Those biomarkers are intended to serve as surrogate endpoints that can show, within one to three years, whether an intervention is plausibly shifting an individual's trajectory toward better function, resilience, and quality of life.

Longevity biotech Cambrian has been awarded up to $30.8 million to support human trials of a daily, oral, next-generation rapamycin analog intended to selectively inhibit mTORC1. The company views dysregulated mTORC1 signaling as a key driver of the metabolic decline that accumulates with age, and it is tying its program to "intrinsic capacity," a composite measure of physical and metabolic resilience that declines over time.

Linnaeus has been awarded up to $22 million to advance a drug targeting the G protein-coupled estrogen receptor (GPER) into human trials for healthspan preservation. Interestingly, the company is building on its work in oncology, where more than 100 cancer patients have been treated with its drug (LNS8801) in early human trials and signals observed in those patients suggested potential translation into aging-related benefits.