Startups in the field of anti-aging biotechnology, which will be relevant in 2019

Below is a list of relevant projects in the field of rejuvenating biotechnology in 2019, which will soon turn into promising startups. It is still a new industry with almost unlimited potential, and only a small part of the possibilities is being actively developed.

This state of affairs persists, despite the infusion of hundreds of millions into venture funds managed by companies such as Juvenescence or Life Biosciences . The research community is tightly occupied by potential methods of rejuvenation , which lie on the surface. Anyone who is minimally informed about this area knows about them. And any ignorant person can easily sort out the issue - simply by writing an email to Aubrey de Gray or other members of the SENS foundation. There will not be a better time to start a company that deals with anti-aging biotechnologies!

It is better to delay the development of new senolithic

When it comes to ways to destroy senescent cells , many will have something to offer, but there is an opinion that it is better for everyone to slow down with the generation of new ideas and to begin to wait until the existing versions of senolysis therapy begin to be introduced into clinical practice.

New companies dealing with senolitic therapy are now using a dozen different competing techniques, and it will take several more years to develop them. There are a lot of old people in the world who would benefit from senolithics. Within the vast medical ecosystem of rejuvenation, there is a place for many competing methods of destruction of senescent cells.
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Nevertheless, there is a real danger that the failure of any of the leading companies in this area will provoke financing problems for the entire industry. If you create a senolithic company now, your future will directly depend on the results of tests carried out by Unity Biotechnology . Unity programs do not reflect other, much more promising methods of cleansing the body from senescent cells. Of course, this situation is unfair, but, alas, it works that way. If Unity doesn't succeed, investors get nervous.

Delivery of cheap senolithic to older people

The most remarkable thing in the entire history of the development of the senolithic over the past five years is that the first drugs that have been tested on animals and people really work well. In addition, they are cheap and easily accessible. The combination of dasatinib and quercetin , fisetin , payperlongumin - all of these substances have been tested on animals and there is convincing evidence to support their senolitic effect. And they are all very cheap.

Why, then, dozens of millions of people in the United States still suffer from arthritis and other age-related inflammatory diseases, the main cause of which is the accumulation of senescent cells in the body? Why no one has yet launched a logistics company to significantly improve the quality of life of these people with just one dose of senolithic? Production and delivery of the drug will cost about $ 50-100, and the selling price may be twice as high. A rare case when you can simultaneously make a profit and help humanity.

Biological age estimate

Epigenetic hours , which allow to determine the biological age, which may differ from the chronological, is a great idea in theory. In practice, no one knows exactly what they are measuring, so at present they are useless to evaluate the results of specific approaches to rejuvenation, such as the use of senolithic.

Nevertheless, this technology is already well developed, and in principle, it is possible to launch a company engaged in a personalized assessment of biological age, the results of which can be used to assess the effectiveness of senolysis therapy or other techniques in the problem of aging. There is an opinion that biological age measurement technologies should develop in parallel with the advent of new therapies - only in this case they will be useful. Nowadays, this niche in the market remains free - a great opportunity for those who want to do this.

Competitor Revel Pharmaceuticals in the area of ​​the breakdown of glucoseepane interprotein cross-links

Revel Pharmaceuticals is the only company that works on the destruction of interprotein cross-links formed by glucosean . Interprotein stitching is one of the main reasons for the formation of wrinkles on the skin and a decrease in the elasticity of blood vessels. Success in this area will be as significant as in the case of the Senoliths. Many researchers are interested in this problem, are working on it and need funding to move on and develop techniques to solve it. Where are the competitors of Revel? It is believed that this will be the next big step in anti-aging biotechnology.

Platform for searching for bacterial enzymes that destroy metabolic debris

As regards the development of methods for the destruction of toxic molecules in the human body, it was predicted that the screening process for bacterial strains taken from soil and seawater samples in order to find enzymes useful for this purpose would be far more cost effective than developing small molecules , even if use machine learning methods.

The forecast looks correct, considering how much progress has been made in the cultivation of bacteria over several years. However, no one has yet created a company that would precisely focus on developing this technique as a platform for many, many potentially possible anti-aging therapies.

There are many amyloids , various oxidized lipids, and countless components of lipofuscin that we will have to deal with, and this is only the beginning. Companies such as LysoClear and Revel Pharmaceuticals found substances - prototypes of their drugs, working with the bacterial world, but did not create platforms based on their processes. This should make the next generation of companies that will work in this area.

Blocking telomere magnification as a universal cancer therapy

Work on blocking the telomere lengthening process using telomerase is going on in laboratories and has already advanced far enough to make a jerk and launch a startup. It’s time for someone to get a license for one of the methods and start the process of introducing it into clinical practice.

A more effective, cheap and widely applicable cancer therapy that suppresses immunotherapy is a matter for the near future. And it will be based on blocking the increase in telomeres. All forms of cancer "work" by lengthening their telomeres, respectively, if you block this process, the tumor will disappear. Being put into practice, this single form of therapy can cure any form of cancer.

Three pillars of the rejuvenation of the immune system

The rejuvenation of the immune system is based on three key points. Very few companies now work in these areas, and it is important that they become much more. First, you need to restore the size and function of the thymus . It will be good if there are more competing companies and more techniques on the market, and not just those that offer Repair Biotechnologies , Intervene Immune and Lygenesis .

Secondly, we need a new way to clean and replace damaged and improperly functioning cells of the peripheral immune system, without coarse and risky methods of chemotherapy and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation . A softer strategy of targeted cell destruction that can be applied to the elderly and sick people.

Thirdly, the industry needs a method for introducing a new, functional, and young population of hematopoietic stem cells , which again will be softer than existing transplantation methods, and thus can be applied to older patients. Success in any of these three areas will give a serious impetus to the development of the other two.

Universal platform of cell therapy - delivery and implantation of a population of new stem cells

A key feature of aging is a reduction in the number of stem cells . Existing cell therapies do not address this issue at all. The population of old stem cells should be replaced by new, young stem cells. Stem cell niche and signaling pathways should be adjusted to protect new cells from deactivation. We need platforms that will allow to achieve these goals for any arbitrary groups of stem cells, or at least for most of the most important stem cell populations. This is the path to a significant improvement in the health of elderly patients.

80/20 solution in universal gene therapy

The community needs a gene therapy platform that works with minimal changes for most tissues and in most cases provides a high degree of cell coverage and configurable targeting by cell type and tissue. Perhaps it will be possible to build it on the basis of the best viral vector AAV or it will arise as a result of the development of one of the programmable methods of gene therapy, such as that of the Oisin Biotechnologies company .

Anyway, this platform is very necessary. Much could be achieved right now if it were not necessary to develop each new gene therapy literally from scratch, spending years finding ways to get enough cell coverage and overcome serious obstacles, such as an immune response .

In the future, gene therapy will replace small molecules in most cases, but this requires a significant increase in the efficiency of their development. The first 80/20 platforms, which will be quite well applicable in most cases, will bring incredible results.

Problem solving medical tourism

Improving therapy, including rejuvenation, in the future will be resorted to in hundreds of times more people than the number of patients who are undergoing medical procedures. Healthy people who want to improve their bodies are much more than those who need treatment for medical reasons. The very nature of medical tourism will change dramatically, since with the advent of many new methods of improving health and potential customers will be much more.

The current market is chaotic and filled with scammers, but we have a great opportunity to solve this problem and to attract the full potential of regulatory bodies in order to test and introduce new therapeutic methods into clinical practice.

Many companies prefer to conduct the first tests of their therapies on a person in Australia , because in it they cost them two times cheaper than the same tests in the USA or Europe. There is no reason to believe that in other places the costs of companies cannot be ten times lower than in the USA or Europe, and new therapies will be introduced into clinical practice solely through medical tourism. This kind of competition is the only way to temper excessive insane regulation , which hinders progress.

Methods for direct recovery of mitochondrial function

The loss of mitochondrial function is central to the aging processes associated with aging, which cause many age-related pathologies.

Mitochondrial antioxidants are developing, and several drugs have already been released to the market, but in order to solve the problem of mitochondrial damage and their extinction with age, more powerful techniques are needed. For example, the implementation of the allotropic expression of the MitoSENS program, as a backup source of vital mitochondrial proteins. Another example is the delivery of new mitochondria into cells , possibly modified in such a way as to be resistant to mutations and injuries that provoke a general inhibition of mitochondrial function. Or methods of reliable and complete recovery in the old tissues of the normal processes of mitophagy and reproduction of mitochondria peculiar to young people.

This is a serious problem and we need ambitious solutions.

Translated by Irina Abramidze , SENS Volunteers Group