From ancient tales of an elixir of life with the power to confer immortality, to stories of a mythical fountain of youth recounted around the world for thousands of years, to modern-day billionaires biohacking their bodies in an attempt to stave off death, humans have always had an obsession with longevity.
For the pharma industry, the quest to live forever or stay eternally young has largely been viewed as an impractical allocation of R&D resources. However, the need to increase humans’ overall healthy, productive lifespan has growing pharmacologic validity, especially because people are now living longer than ever before. By 2030, one in six people in the world will be over age 60; by 2050 that segment jumps to 22%.
Aging — while not a disease itself — is the dominant risk factor for many of the world’s most prevalent chronic diseases: cardiovascular conditions such as congestive heart failure and hypertension, metabolic disorders such as diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia, and of course numerous types of cancer. And the longer humans live, the more time they have to get sick.
“When people hear you’re working in the aging space, they immediately picture Rip Van Winkle — having the quality of life of a typical 90-year-old for another hundred years — which is not ideal from an individual, family member or medical system perspective,” says Daniel Oliver, CEO and co-founder of Rejuvenate Bio, a 2018 spinout from the Wyss Institute at Harvard. “So it’s important for everybody working in this space to focus not just on mortality endpoints, but also quality of life and health endpoints.”
This shift in focus from lifespan to ‘healthspan’ — the number of years lived versus the number of years lived in good health — reflects a growing recognition of the importance of quality over quantity when measuring longevity. Coined by gerontologists John Rowe and Robert Kahn in their influential 1987 article on successful aging, the concept of healthspan has recently gained new attention in the pharma industry and rightfully so, given the surprisingly large chasm in the U.S. between average years lived (76.4) and average years lived in good health (63.9).
It is estimated that 95% of U.S. adults aged 60 and older have a chronic disease and 80% have two or more. Facing a growing demographic of unhealthy seniors, a handful of innovative biotechs are reframing the longevity discussion: Rather than treat the symptoms of aging one disease at a time, what if we could instead focus on the root causes, enabling treatment of multiple chronic diseases simultaneously?
Armed with compelling preclinical research and novel genetic medicines, these biotechs are looking to close the gap between healthspan and lifespan with the ultimate goal of ushering in a new, comprehensive therapeutic approach to aging.
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Pharma’s new age of longevity: Closing the gap between healthspan and lifespan
New treatments offer the promise of attacking multimorbidity in age-related diseases
