Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel can buy whatever they want – even eternal youth?
Tech billionaires are pouring massive sums of their wealth into the bitter battle to be the best Benjamin Button, pushing the market for life-extending therapies into a $25 billion business.
OpenAI CEO Altman, 39, and Amazon founder Bezos, 60, have spent millions in recent years on longevity labs Retro Biosciences and Altos Labs, respectively. PayPal co-founder Thiel, 57, spent more than $1 million on the Methuselah Foundation, a biomedical charity that aims to make 90 50-year-olds by 2030.
But the road to cell reprogramming and gene manipulation is not paved with gold. Anti-aging advocates face regulatory hurdles, ethical questions and long-term financial concerns, among other challenges, in the race to keep the Grim Reaper at bay.
“We fail a little, early and fast, and our goal is to get a return on our mission,” Methuselah co-founder and CEO David Gobel told The Post. “Our mission is lives saved versus dollars made.”
The future of longevity
Gobel, a serial entrepreneur, started Methuselah in 2001 after asking himself a question when he was approaching 50: “What is the most important thing I can do, make more money or do more health?”
The nonprofit counts Thiel among its early champions. Recently, data shows that Vitalik Buterin – the 30-year-old co-founder of Ethereum, who earned the title of the world’s youngest crypto billionaire – contributed more than $13.6 million in 2021.
“We haven’t asked for donations since probably 2013,” Gobel said. 72. “I hate begging and I realized we had to earn our way forward with results.”
Methuselah boasts nine companies in its portfolio. One of them, Leucadia Therapeutics, developed a device to restore the flow of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain and remove toxins that may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
Another, X-Therma, is focused on using its sub-zero technology to store organs for over 72 hours and transport them across the Atlantic Ocean for better transplant availability.
Methuselah also collaborated with NASA on a competition to identify ways to grow human tissue in a lab and a challenge to figure out how to feed astronauts on extended space missions.
What I could imagine one day is that you get into a ‘Star Trek’ teleportation pod and it just remodels you.
Methuselah co-founder and CEO David Gobel
Bone marrow regeneration, which involves replacing dysfunctional bone marrow cells with healthy, new ones, is a human advance that Gobel would really like to see in his lifetime.
“If you can rejuvenate bone marrow, you can rejuvenate anything,” he said. “And if you can rejuvenate the blood, then the downstream effects are almost certain to be profoundly good.”
When will these inventions become available?
Gobel said expensive and time-consuming regulatory hurdles are major barriers to bringing innovations to market.
“[A] The software company can get a really amazing product out the door without much tweaking for $5 million, and then it sinks or floats in the market,” Gobel said. “For a biotech, you’re talking about $1 billion and 12 to in 15 years – and that money has to come from somewhere.”
A new drug or medical device has long required laboratory studies, animal testing and human clinical trials to ensure it is safe. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviews the data to decide whether the drug or device should be approved and continues to monitor the product’s safety after it becomes available to the public.
On average, it takes the FDA about 12 years to approve a new drug and three to seven years to regulate a medical device.
This process could be accelerated by the FDA’s shift from animal testing to screening new drugs. Gobel applauds the move toward “more modern methods,” but notes that the agency has not updated its regulations to allow the use of animal-free models.
The FDA also has not approved any drugs or therapies specifically for the treatment of aging. The agency does not consider aging to be a disease, but a natural process.
So don’t expect a life-extending pill anytime soon—Gobel thinks there might be something even bigger.
“I think the next 20 years there won’t be a pill. Who knows after that?” Gobel said. “What I could imagine one day is that you get into a ‘Star Trek’ teleportation pod and it just remodels you. So I would say that it would happen earlier, in 2060.
Ethical questions
There are several ways private companies are trying to delay death. Altos Labs, backed by Bezos, launched in 2022 with the goal of reversing aging by rejuvenating cells.
Meanwhile, Retro Biosciences emerged that year with a focus on cellular reprogramming and plasma-inspired therapeutics to add 10 “good” years to your life. Altman reportedly invested $180 million.
This 2020s boom in biotech startups has sparked cutting-edge research—and ethical dilemmas.
Dr. Joshua Chodosh, director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Palliative Care at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, said a key issue facing the longevity field is, “Who do we study and when do we intervene?”
“We know that there are some therapies that may be helpful for someone who is much older but potentially harmful for someone who is much younger,” Chodosh told The Post.
Another challenge is that researchers focus on a single disease and a single organ, because that’s how the FDA approves drugs.
“And yet, when we think about health span … we know it’s not just a single organ,” Chodosh said, referring to the number of years people can expect to live in good health. “It’s much more integrated than that, through many organs, or even potentially all organs in the entire human body.”
Some researchers have speculated that despite medical advances, our greatest gains in longevity may be in the rearview mirror. Average life expectancy in the US was 77.5 years in 2022 and is projected to increase modestly over the next three decades even amid the global hunt for an antidote to aging.
Chodosh said it is important to address environmental conditions, such as pollution, poor diet, sedentary lifestyles and insomnia, to live longer and healthier lives.
“I think a lot of our longevity success has been through environmental improvements [and] better security,” said Chodosh. “When you look at the data on life expectancy and death, some of them are clearly affected [by] what concerns or challenges are there in the community that don’t necessarily have so much to do with individuals and their particular health conditions.”
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