#11 Google's big play into longevity
Calico Labs has little to show for its $3.5B of raised capital
The Agenda 👇
News bulletin 📰
Google's big play into longevity
Recent funding in longevity 💰
Upcoming events 📅
Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
1/ News bulletin 📰
🇸🇬 New centre to study longevity aims to extend Singaporeans' lifespan by up to 5 years - world’s oldest population set to grow older
🤖 NaNotics to Collaborate with Mass General Cancer Center (MGCC) on Novel Nanomedicine - goal is first-in-human use of NaNots™ to treat cancer
🧬 Zero-calorie sweeteners alter the microbiome - open-label RCT published in Cell show some might impair glycaemic response in healthy adults
🧠 Umbilical plasma injections reduce biological age in humans - difference is not dramatic but is measurable by Horvath’s new clock GrimAge
🐁 Supplementation of NAD+ precursor alleviates progression of age-related hearing loss in a mouse model - results demonstrate therapeutic potential
2/ Google's big play into longevity
Calico Labs, short for the California Life Company, is the brainchild and capital beneficiary of the Google cofounder, Larry Page. In 2013, he announced that his company would form Calico and fund it generously to decipher the causes of aging and develop therapies. Among the first major players to enter longevity, Google hoped to extend the human life span by developing a breakthrough as important, and as useful to humanity, as the transistor.
Calico got off to a roaring start, hiring Cynthia Kenyon as its Vice President of Ageing Research, who early in her career showed that altering a single DNA base pair in a roundworm doubled its lifespan. The company has gone on to hire more high-profile stars such as artificial-intelligence specialist Daphne Koller.
With equal contributions from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and the pharmaceutical company AbbVie, Calico has raised an eye-watering $3.5 billion. However, close to a decade on from its high-profile launch, Calico has maintained a super-secretive status, publishing very little of note, and mandating all visiting scientists sign nondisclosure agreements.
Even among the few dozen press releases Calico has published, there were only senior hires and broad descriptions of collaborations with outside labs and pharmaceutical companies, most of them focused on the overwhelmingly vague mission of researching aging and associated diseases. Calico’s reprogramming lab published its first preprint on the topic only last year. This has left the broader longevity research community frustrated and at risk of duplicating research that is taking place under the hood.
Of course, Google founders aren’t the first billionaires to take a punt on the ageing problem. Larry Ellison, the cofounder of Oracle, donated $335 million to scientists studying ageing before redirecting his foundation’s grants toward eliminating polio in 2013. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, has also donated to the longevity sector, and there’s even 2 $500,000 Palo Alto Longevity Prizes to anyone who can radically extend the life of a mammal. Since Calico’s founding, we have also seen the rise of Altos Labs, the Bezos-backed behemoth now dominating the capital and talent resources in longevity on both sides of the Atlantic.
The limited information we have from Calico Labs suggests the firm is deploying its capital to better understand the basic science, rather than develop novel products. The Google venture is well placed to develop a suite of longevity research programmes, although the absence of any published ground-breaking research, one must question its success.
3/ Recent funding in longevity 💰
4/ Upcoming events 📅
🇮🇪 The Longevity Summit Dublin takes place this year on 18th-20th of September in Ireland! Conference will feature some of the world’s renowned longevity experts like George Church (Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School), Aubrey de Grey(Co-Founder, SENS Research Foundation), Evelyne Yehudit Bischof (Associate professor, internal medicine specialist, Longevity physician at Human Longevity Inc.),Jim Mellon (Chairman & Co-Founder Juvenescense ; Global Investor ), Greg Grinberg (Actualfood Founder & CEO), Phil Newman (Founder, First Longevity, Editor-in–Chief Longevity.Technology), and many more.
🇨🇭 On September 28-30 the Longevity Investors Conference (LIC) are hosting their third annual conference in Gstaad! It will be a great opportunity to learn about diverse longevity investment strategies, network with like-minded leaders, and get acquainted with the recent scientific breakthroughs by the leading longevity experts in the world.
🇩🇪 The Rejuvenation Startup Summit returns this year in Berlin, Germany on October 14-15. This is a vibrant networking event that brings together startups and members of the longevity venture capital/investor ecosystem, all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan.
5/ Jobs in longevity 🧑💼
Retro Biosciences // Reprogramming Scientist // Redwood City, CA
Rejuvenate Bio // Chief Medical Officer // San Diego, CA
NewLimit // Senior/ Research Associate, Functional Genomics // San Francisco, CA
Juvena Therapeutics // Head of Translational Biology // Redwood City, CA
Altos Labs // US general interest - UK general interest // US - UK