Human longevity science has seen a surge of commercial investment in recent years, as venture capitalists and private financiers flood the space looking to develop medical interventions and therapies that purport to extend the human lifespan.
At the Inc. 5000 conference in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday, the scientific researchers Jay Olshansky and Allen Wang discussed the human longevity boom alongside Mark Rivers, the CEO of Canyon Ranch, a hospitality group.
The trio all agreed that the explosion of investment and hype surrounding human longevity can sometimes muddle a vital point: It’s important the industry focuses on improving people’s health, rather than lifespans.
“I came into the [human longevity] field a couple years ago, and really the philosophy that all the researchers enforce is that our research is extending the health-span, not the lifespan,” Wang, an epigenomic researcher at the University of California, San Diego, said.
“A year of healthy life has an extraordinary value that I think we don’t often understand or appreciate,” Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago said, echoing Wang.
While eliminating disease is a noble and worthwhile goal, that isn’t the goal of longevity research. Rather, Olshansky’s field seeks to understand how to expand the years of healthy life enjoyed by most people. “The longer we live, the more difficult it becomes to live longer,” he said.
It’s easy to see how a startup promising the elixir of youth could be seen as peddling snake oil, Olshansky argued. But longevity is a broad category, encompassing apps that track certain biometric markers, supplements that purport to promote longevity, as well as companies like Aeovian Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical firm staffed by PhDs that develops therapies for cellular health.
There’s also full-body MRIs, hormone therapies, and perhaps most popular, GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backs a longevity startup called Retro Biosciences, and the field has grown thanks to the influencer Bryan Johnson, whose attempts to become immortal have become a pop-culture phenomenon portrayed in a Netflix documentary.
What often gets lost in all the hype surrounding longevity, Olshansky said, is that there aren’t a lot of revolutionary therapies available for the common person. At least not yet. Canyon Ranch offers a retreat called Longevity8, which immerses attendees in a protocol of screenings, tests, and various mental health programs. It costs $20,000, and Rivers said “it’s not a panacea,” but it still gets people coming back. “In this space, there are mercenaries, and there are missionaries,” Rivers said. “We are devout believers in science.”
Rivers explained that Longevity8 combines “eastern modalities, mental health, and spiritual wellness” programs with board certified dieticians, sports medicine specialists, and Dexabody scans, which measure bone density.
That kind of treatment might not be affordable for most people. Luckily, there are plenty of ways for the vast majority of humanity to heighten their chances of living longer. “Get a good pair of walking or running shoes,” Olshansky said, “because exercise is about the only equivalent to a fountain of youth that exists today.”
Sam Blum
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