age1 catalyzes contrarian, founder-led companies that will increase healthy human lifespan, yielding the most valuable companies to ever exist.
Through our investments, we strive for counterfactual impact. We are creating a future where all people have agency over how long they live in good health.
Our vision is to make aging and age-related disease optional for all.
Why does it matter?
We’re at a historic inflection point in biotech. In the next decade, the preservation of a healthy life will go from a futuristic ideal to an actionable right.
In the original draft of The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that all humans “derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
This is our goal at age1: the preservation of healthy life, to enable a more dignified future globally for humans of all ages.
Some of the biggest human accomplishments progressed us towards this goal. Since the inception of antibiotics in the 1910s, they have extended the global life expectancy by 23 years. These now-taken-for-granted solutions combat the propensity of humans to develop infections constituting modern medicine, yet the thought of democratizing such therapeutics was once laughable. Similarly, we foresee a future with universal access to a healthy life enabled by longevity biotech.
The preservation of healthy life is critical because it will enable:
- Reduced suffering: Loss of identity, clarity of mind, physical independence, and grief over the decline of our loved ones are all pains we’ve come to expect as necessary counterparts to life. We strive for a future where this is not the norm.
- Increased time with family, friends, and yourself: To maintain the ability to spend quality time with family, friends, pets, nature – and yourself – for longer.
- Diminished financial burden: By 2029, the United States will spend $3 trillion dollars yearly – half its total federal budget– on the medical and social care of adults aged 65 and older. Health, quality of life, and longevity are foundational to global prosperity.
The future age1 wants to create
Currently, there are zero FDA-approved interventions for aging or longevity. We know of 0 interventions that extend maximum lifespan in humans. And 0 clinical trials are underway to test if a therapeutic can intervene in human aging, holistically.
Zero.
Most of the field is focused on the “hallmarks of aging”, a useful but reductionist framework that doesn’t address the systematic, multifactorial nature of aging biology. As a result, the field is dogmatic and not growing at the pace it should.
We have tunnel-visioned on the same shortlist of mostly small-molecule interventions, candidates like rapamycin and senolytics, without substantive progress in determining exactly how they affect aging in humans. After 45 years of research in the modern era of the field, we only have evidence to rigorously support that lifestyle/exercise and nutrition can extend the average life expectancy in humans.
We need to change this current trajectory. Our goal is to:
- Finally put small molecule interventions to the test in a rigorous way to answer once and for all if they can affect human aging.
- Push the aging field to embrace newer modalities such as biologics, cell therapy, gene therapy, and tissue engineering to fulfill the promise of regenerative medicine.
The future age1 wants to create is one with effective and safe moonshot interventions, approved for human use. We focus on interventions which:
- Delay: Delay or prevent aging
- Replace: Replace aged or damaged cells and tissues with youthful ones
- Restore: Turn the clock back to restore the age of cells and tissues to a youthful stage
- Pause: Pause the aging clock in human tissues and cells by inducing stasis
Build now, age later
We must partner with the most ambitious, talented founders and the best LPs in order to tackle one of medicine’s biggest problems.
This inflection point in history may never present itself again. In a new letter from Laura, she shares her predictions and why this is the decade to build for the future of longevity.
age1 will seed the best founders the field has ever seen, equipping them with the right resources to finally attain proven safe, equitable interventions to delay, restore, replace, and pause aging in humans. With the first-ever FDA-approved longevity drugs from these companies, they’ll scale to obtain $10B+ valuations and impact global health systems.
For these founder-led biotechs to succeed and thrive, we need world-class founders, talent, and investors.
That’s you.
It is only through a collective effort that we can deliver the best returns for our future. Every investment in the aging field – time, effort, and capital – doesn’t just extend the runway of a company or team, but the runway of healthy human life.