Some thoughts on the Longevity Biotech industry (and some info on what different longevity biotech companies are doing) by an Associate at a longevity-oriented venture capitalist: “Artemy Shumskiy is an Senior Associate at LongeVC, a venture capital company backing visionary biotech.”
Perhaps one of the ways to make people more interested in longevity extension, in general, is to first focus on longevity-adjacent problems that people actually recognize as such. One way to do that, of course, is to focus on age-associated diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. People absolutely care about those things and solving them would (a) extend the mean lifespan/healthspan and (b) potentially shine some light on the complexity of aging itself. This is where longevity biotech and classical biotech converge - given there are few regulatory shortcuts to tackle aging directly, most longevity biotech companies go into clinical development targeting age-associated diseases, with the hope of adapting their therapeutics for aging itself in the future. The caveat, of course, is that this is an inherently suboptimal strategy, but this is a topic for another post.
I believe there may be problems even more adjacent to the central thesis of longevity biotech than the ones many longevity biotech companies decide to tackle, and addressing such could make longevity biotech more favorable as a whole. In this series, I want to focus on current and emergent themes of research and development that I think have the highest chance of advancing further, and thus favorably shifting public opinion in favor of longevity biotech.
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Rejuvenate Bio’s approach is based on transient expression of FGF21, TGFβ1 and αKlotho, all known for their roles in aging, with three different combinations (with no information on RJB-03 nature) being currently tested in preclinical experiments against a number of age-associated diseases in humans. In dogs, the company has launched pilot trials of RJB-01 (FGF21+TGFβ1) in mitral valve disease and obesity/diabetes, and have programs for kidney failure, osteoarthritis and even epigenetic reprogramming in earlier stages. While I personally think it may be risky to have such a number of programs at this stage in terms of resource allocation, and having in mind the same concerns on AAVs, I think that having a combinatorial approach, as compared to using just one gene, may have considerably more chances of success. Eager to see their pilot trial results.
Full Substack article:
And Artemy’s Full Substack and other articles: