Biotechs that tackle the effects of aging are beginning to make headlines: in January Altos Labs Inc. launched with a reported investment from Jeff Bezos. With Bezos getting involved with San Francisco-based Altos, the immediate reaction was that anti-aging biotechs would be there for the benefit of billionaires searching for eternal life.
Not so, according to London U.K.-based Genflow Biosciences plc, which hopes to show that fighting aging is really about improving health as people age.
Apollo Health Ventures raised $180 million for a new venture capital fund focused on biotechnology companies developing therapies for age-related diseases. It may also invest in healthtech and digital health opportunities, but the latter constitute a minority pursuit for an investment team that is building up capabilities and expertise in disease biology.
When James Peyer, Cambrian Biopharma Inc.’s CEO, watched his grandfather fail every cancer treatment and eventually pass away, he came to a realization that now forms the backbone of his company. “The more I learned about cancer, the more convinced I became that we were approaching cancer as a disease in the wrong way,” Peyer told BioWorld. “We were waiting until people were sick and only then doing something about it.” Cambrian just closed on an oversubscribed series C that brought in $100 million to develop a pipeline of therapies designed to treat and prevent age-related diseases.
DUBLIN – Michael Greve, one of Germany’s most successful internet entrepreneurs and investors, is personally committing €300 million (US$362 million) to building a portfolio of biotechnology firms focused on different aspects of aging. His investment vehicle, Kizoo Technology Capital GmbH, of Karlsruhe, has already provided seed funding to more than a dozen early stage firms. Greve is now ready to invest in follow-on rounds, particularly in four core companies he described as “category openers” in rejuvenation biotech. “We are really super focused, because there are so many things we could do,” he told BioWorld.
Exercise is a powerful way to keep the elderly brain working well, not just in individuals that are healthy, but also in those with neurodegenerative disease. Even individuals with familial Alzheimer’s, though they will develop dementia regardless of whether they exercise or not, will have relatively better cognitive function if they exercise than if they don’t.
Fountain Therapeutics Inc., a California company working to create treatments for age-related diseases, said Khosla Ventures has led a $6 million series A-1 financing of the startup, with participation from Nan Fung Life Sciences, which earlier contributed $5 million to the round.
Australian researchers led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney have compiled the first reference genome database of healthy older Australians, which potentially can predict disease-linked gene variants more accurately than has been previously possible.
How organisms age, and what determines their lifespan, is one of the basic questions of biology. It is also a major area of biopharmaceutical interest. Partly, this is because most people want to delay shuffling off this mortal coil for as long as possible.
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Science (IMS) and Keio University School of Medicine (KUSM) in Japan have discovered that people ages 110 or longer, the so-called supercentenarians, have elevated blood levels of CD4+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs).
Two very different roles were reported for the protein REST last week. In adults, REST activation appeared to extend lifespan by reducing overall brain activity. Principal investigator Bruce Yankner, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging, told BioWorld that in postmortem brain samples of individuals who had had no cognitive impairments at the time of their death, his team found "a correlation between down-regulation of excitation and extended longevity."
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