The maturity of a billionaire

Businessmen strive for eternal life

Anton Gopka, General Partner and Co-Founder of ATEM Capital
Forbes, 30.11.2016

Wealthy people around the world manage to live longer and invest money in new life extension projects. How do they struggle with old age?

The end of the American elections ended not only with the unexpected victory of Donald Trump, but also set a record – the new president–elect has the most venerable age in the history of the United States - he is 70 years old. However, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, is 69 years old, and her main rival in the party, Bernie Sanders– is 75. The former leader of this "rating", Ronald Reagan, became president at the age of 69 and left his post at 77, and died at the age of 94. Reagan's rival in the election, Jimi Carter, and his successor, George H.W. Bush, are now over 92 years old, and both lead active public lives.

These examples reflect a new trend – the old paradigm of life consisting of three parts: education, work, and a "quiet" pension is becoming a thing of the past. In the USA and Western Europe, up to 65% of people with higher education over the age of 65 continue to work. The experience of the twentieth century, when an increase in life expectancy led to an increase in dependent pensioners, convinced economists that the aging of the population would cause catastrophic consequences for the economy. In fact, many ideas turned out to be myths – according to recent studies, an increasing percentage of the population over 65 years old continue to work actively, their labor productivity is not inferior to younger colleagues, they have high stress resistance in conflict situations, about a quarter receive additional education, most plan to change their professional sphere or employer.

By 2020, the population over the age of 60 will reach one billion people. Thus, a large growing market is being formed – older people who need not only effective drugs for serious diseases; they, first of all, want to look and feel great for many years after the "retirement age". But then why didn't investments in the development of drugs for longevity become mainstream? There are a number of constraining factors, including a limited understanding of the biology of aging, regulatory problems and sluggish interest in the pharmaceutical industry, which leads to an ambiguous attitude of society and investors.

At the moment, there is no reliable clinical data confirming the effect of any medical intervention on human life expectancy. On the contrary, the leading scientific journal Nature recently published an article that talks about the limit of the life span measured by nature for humans as a species. Advances in medicine have increased the average life expectancy, but have not changed its maximum duration, which has remained unchanged over the past decades and is presumably "programmed" at about 100 years. Thus, radical prolongation of life is hardly feasible without interference with the very nature of man, which causes society "heartburn" in connection with many unresolved ethical issues.

Peter Thiel, a staunch libertarian, the first external investor of Facebook and co–founder of PayPal (estimated fortune - $2.7 billion), parries these common doubts: "In the nineteenth century, it was believed that it was natural for a woman to experience pain at the birth of a child, so painkillers are unnatural. I think that appealing to nature leads to false conclusions... I am sure that not fighting death is just against human nature."

Thiel has many eccentric projects, but his main passion is transhumanism and, above all, technologies for radical life extension. So he finances the research of scientist Aubrey De Grey, who claims that there are already people among us who will live 1000 years, and molecular biologist Cynthia Kenyon, who discovered mutations in the genes of roundworms that multiply prolong their lives. When asked why Thiel began investing in these scientists, he answers: "They think unconventionally and are more optimistic than many, and this stimulates research in this direction."

Peter Thiel was actually the only well-known investor from Silicon Valley who actively supported Donald Trump in the presidential election. Once his angelic investment of half a million dollars in Facebook brought him a billion, now his support for Donald Trump of $1.25 million three weeks before the election outcome may turn out to be a very successful bet. Although at that moment, most Silicon Valley residents turned against Thiel, demanding, among other things, his exclusion from the Facebook Board of Directors. Now he has joined Donald Trump's transition team and, subsequently, is likely to become one of the new president's key advisers on technological development.

Industry experts are convinced that the regulation of the most complex technologies, including regenerative medicine and cellular technologies (stem cells, "grown organs") will be simplified under the new administration. The relevant laws "hung" in committees under the Obama administration in endless discussions about ethics and the risks of interference in human biology. In general, the US pharmaceutical market reacted to Trump's election unequivocally – with almost double-digit growth in the sector index.

Despite the complexities of science and regulation, a number of investors have been investing in the topic of aging for a long time. A typical model of investment in "aging" has become a direct relationship between an investor and scientists. Often this model is philanthropic in nature with minimal expectations of a refund, in Russia it is called "transformative investments" ("impact investing").

72-year-old Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, (fortune $49.3 billion) has donated more than $430 million to aging research since 1997, declaring his desire to live forever. He curtailed his investments in 2013, when Google co-founders 43-year-old Sergey Brin ($36.8 billion) and Larry Page ($37.7 billion) launched a new biotech company Calico (California Life Company) to study the molecular mechanisms of aging. Their company, together with AbbVie (a structure that left Abbott), agreed to invest up to $1.5 billion in programs against age-dependent diseases.

Calico does not disclose details of its plans. The organization has entered into an agreement with the Buck Institute, which is engaged in research in the field of aging. I attended a meeting of the Institute's board of Directors and advisory board and talked with the Institute's CEO Brian Kennedy. In his opinion, science has changed the attitude to the problems of aging, progress has been made in extending the life of model animals, and the time has come for conducting clinical trials on humans.

There are also Russian examples of such fundamental projects. In particular, we met with Alexander Chikunov, a former top manager of RAO UES of Russia, who in 2009 devoted himself entirely to technologies in the field of life extension and sustainable development. Among his projects are the famous "Skulachev drops", which he financed in 2008-2011, and then Oleg Deripaska and Rusnano consistently financed. Currently, visomitin eye drops are approved for the indication of dry eye syndrome and the initial stage of age-related cataract and are available in pharmacies in Russia. The company plans to enter the world markets.

The largest project was a large-scale experiment using more than a thousand known substances on 20,000 long-lived mice, conducted in the USA under the guidance of biologist Alexey Ryazanov. According to him, exceptional results have been achieved – a number of substances have been found that prolong the life of model animals for a longer period than the most successful geroprotector rapamycin. Alexander Chikunov plans to make the results of the experiment public in the near future.

I also met with Timur Artemyev, Evgeny Chichvarkin's former partner at Euroset, in New York, where he has a laboratory. Since 2005, Timur Artemyev has been funding a number of fundamental projects under the guidance of Professor Evgeny Nudler of the New York University School of Medicine in the field of aging and genetics.

For most investors in biotechnology, the philanthropic aspect is extremely important, but it is not sufficient for everyone. Many investors are interested in the constant growth of capital and the volume of development support, while providing partial or full liquidity on the horizon of 5-7 years.

To form a pool of such investors, Andrey Fomenko, the founder of IVAO and a major owner of premium commercial real estate in St. Petersburg, creates the Longevity Impact Fund together with ATEM Capital. Fomenko has been working on the problems of life extension and the fight against diseases associated with aging for more than 20 years and is a sponsor of a number of international events and publications in this field. The Foundation has attracted the world's best experts to cooperate, including Brian Kennedy, who left the post of Director General of the Buck Institute at the end of October this year. The fund will work with the largest American venture funds, two-thirds of all major M&A transactions and most IPOs of biotech companies occur, as a rule, with the participation of the top 20 funds.

An in-depth understanding of the biology of aging and the interest of large professional investors have transformed the ideas of single philanthropists into the mainstream. Francis Fukuyama's fears from his book "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnological Revolution" that humanity as a result of the "graying" of the population may become a "giant almshouse" are not confirmed. People lead an active lifestyle after sixty and are ripe for new technologies in prolonging and improving the quality of life.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  01.12.2016