The science is way ahead of the biopharma business model

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Thanks to AI, the Law of Accelerating Returns remains true, where the rate and annual dynamic of technical innovation is increasing every year. For example, the next 5 years of innovation will be equivalent to the last 15.

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We need to think in the long-term and focus on impact, not merely short-term profits. A long-term strategy does not mean delayed profits for decades, of course. It merely means that progressive investors must have a clear vision of the strategy. We must take into account that the rate of progress will continue to accelerate in upcoming years.

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Consider Google, which had 17 search engine competitors at the time of its founding. Instead of competing in marketing, which was impossible at that time, Google instead focused on improving technology. And within just 4 years, Google became one of the biggest internet companies.

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It will come as no surprise that Google will also become the biggest anti-aging and longevity company via their companies Calico and Verily. Meanwhile, because geroscience is so complex, a brute-force approach based on unlimited financing is unlikely to yield results. That’s why we need more initiatives, both large and small.

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But this new longevity industry will be so big that there will be enough room for many many Googles there. It will be the most impactful industry in modern history. It is clear that the first investors which will choose the right strategy will earn the greatest returns as this new industry emerges. And we have evidence now that we are in the start of an investment boom in the longevity industry.

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Risky, unsafe, and overhyped companies must be neutralized before they harm the reputation of the industry

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Some big biotech failures have already slowed down progress in biomedicine for decades. It happened previously with gene therapies and stem cells. The problem is that the anti-aging longevity industry will always attract charlatans and this could harm the entire industry and credible scientists. That’s why it is in the interest of progressive science community and innovative businesses to create an effective framework for investment relations and safe evaluation of promising startups and technologies.

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The efficiency of scientific translation is currently bottlenecked by the VC financing process. There is a finite number of firms and dollars. In 2015, the US venture capital industry invested $58.8B in all the companies which drive the economy forward. With less than half going to biotech.  The same year, Americans spent $59.9B on beer, $63B on hairdressers, and $88.4B on gambling, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.  We need to rethink the current funding model.

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Inefficiency in VC and academia is considerable. Fraud also damages the investment climate. Theranos is a biotech company that offered a “revolutionary” platform to perform blood tests on a single droplet of blood.  Theranos even has such figures as Henry Kissinger on the board of advisors. The science was not properly evaluated, the hype was deafening, and the company reached over $9B valuation. Then it all came crashing down.

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We need a win-win situation where scientists and business people collaborate to identify the most promising regenerative medicine companies. Deep Knowledge Life Sciences has been at the forefront of longevity investing and we are establishing a vanguard of experts who will protect against repeats of Theranos by publically assessing business plans and scientific publications on a digital desentralized platform.

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It is an undisputed fact that biological aging is the primary risk factor for the most serious non-communicable diseases like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, et cetera. Instead of targeting these diseases individually, we can slow down or even reverse the motor or root cause of these diseases: aging itself. Indeed, healthy lifespan has been extended in mice by 30% -- and that’s only one of several distinct lines of research than could synergize going forward.

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Biopharma business-as-usual is flawed, and focusing on individual manifestations of aging is unwise now that scientists can rejuvenate animals and reduce disease risk for multiple age-related diseases.

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In that era, major progress was made treating particular acute conditions such as heart disease and cancer. However, prevention was largely neglected. Although the science has leapfrogged forward, the business model of big players is frozen in the previous century.

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Progress in the biotech industry is mostly driven by venture capital, biotech and pharma R&D. But big pharma exists in an environment where, on a global scale, there is little incentive to develop preventative therapies. They simply do not currently have a reasonable business model for developing preventative therapies, and are more comfortable moving forward into the future using the framework and business model of reactive treatment that dominated the previous century. If the shift from reactionary toward preventative treatment is left solely in the hands of conservative, traditional VC, biotech and pharma players, it could take decades to foster the much-needed paradigm shift from reactionary to preventative medicine.