Longevity research is a magnet for innovation–and innovative investors

Longevity science is redefining how medical research is done.

Longevity science is redefining how medical research is done.

For more than 100 years, most breakthroughs in medical care resulted from physicians conducting scientific studies that were backed by medical schools or pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

Longevity has created a new paradigm for research and development, in part because the field has attracted non-medical innovators who are obsessively single-minded about sidestepping expectations. 

Some of the biggest names in longevity are backed by Silicon Valley billionaires. Altos Labs launched with $3 billion in funding that included investments from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Russian-born entrepreneur Yuri Milner. Calico Labs was underwritten by Google co-founder Larry Page. Paypal’s Peter Thiel, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and British businessman Jim Mellon have all made big investments in longevity research.

These investors became successful because they kept asking one question: “Why must I do things the way they’ve always been done?” Their willingness to break rules has created the models for online shopping, digital payment systems, smart enterprise technology and a dizzying array of groundbreaking companies.

Their interest in longevity has resulted in anti-ageing companies that often look and act more like tech startups than traditional pharmaceutical research organizations. And this fresh approach is one reason why longevity research is progressing so quickly.

Innovation tends to attract innovators.  In just the last few years, cryptocurrency movers and shakers have fully engaged in longevity.  In 2018, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated $2.4 million ETH to the SENS Research Foundation, an outgrowth from Methuselah Foundation.  Last year, he donated $25 million in SHIB tokens to the Future of Life Institute and 1,000 ETH and 430 billion ELON tokens to Methuselah Foundation.

Now, a new crypto organization, VitaDAO, wants to democratize research by providing funding for longevity projects through a community collective approach to funding. The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) says it wants to help early-stage organizations grown into biotech companies. It operates by funding research that will lead to the creation and monetization of intellectual property. The proceeds of this monetization are returned to the DAO, which uses them to fund future research.

As one recent article points out, “the space is ripe for interested investors, groundbreaking discoveries and development opportunities.”

All this means that a growing community of innovators is increasingly focused on solving the world’s most intractable problem: aging. They are committed to doing this by treating aging the way medicine treats other conditions.

As a result, the longevity community is closer than ever to – as we say – making 90 the new 50 by 2030.

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