The Tribune

By CHRIS ILLING

CCO @ Activtrades Corp

Who wants to live for ever? And how long will I live? If you want to know this, you should have your telomeres examined. These are the sequences at the end of the chromosomes. And the longer the telomeres are, the longer the lifespan. For this discovery, Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack Szostak received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009.

Presently, “forever young” is the motto of the technology elite in Silicon Valley. They invest millions in start-ups with a mission to stop the human aging process. They even experiment on their own bodies.

Would it not be great to be in the prime of your life, with a bank account full to the tilt, and be able to enjoy this state for ever? However, aging and dying are the course of life, often associated with serious illnesses. The tech elite in Silicon Valley does not want to accept this. They plan to hack human biology, and extend your health span or even the entire lifespan. Jeff Bezos and his fellow travellers are investing millions in companies that research medical utopias. Not just for its own sake, because they also smell big business.

A major player in the highly sought-after longevity market, founded by Dave Asprey, is ‘Bulletproof’, a wellness empire that offers care products and nutritional supplements. He promotes methods for longevity and healthy living with a gigantic target group. Asprey’s goal is to live to age 180. He gained great fame through his biohacking experiments. He recently injected stem cells “into every joint, between every vertebra and into my cerebrospinal fluid, my face and my sexual organs”.

His competitors are not as keen to experiment but are particularly willing to pay. ChatGPT creator, Sam Altman, was an early-stage technology investor in the largest bull market in history. In 2021, he invested $180m in ‘Retro Biosciences’, a start-up that wants to extend the healthy human lifespan by 10 years. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, also supports the reprogramming technology that allows human cells to return to the stem cell state with his investment in the company, Altos Labs. This means the body becomes young and healthy again, which increases life expectancy. The German-American investor, Peter Thiel, also sees great potential in this and financially supports the Methusalah Foundation. Their motto: “Make 90 the new 50 by 2030”.

The global anti-aging market is worth billions of dollars with significant growth potential. Here is a list of some of the anti-aging stocks looking to capitalise on that growth.

1. Acumen Pharmaceuticals specialises in gene therapy.

2. Meira GTx is focused on regenerative medicine, human embryonic stem cell technology and induced pluripotent stem cell technology.

3. Lineage Cell Therapeutics is developing regenerative medicines for chronic and life-threatening aging-related conditions.

American doctor, Dr Mark Hyman, is not a tech billionaire but is considered an internationally-popular expert on longevity and, according to his own statements, has reduced his biological age from 63 to 43 years. His recipe for success is a fixed morning routine, three hours of exercise a day and a special, natural diet. The Silicon Valley utopia of a longer life is not Hyman’s focus, and he concentrates on an extended period of health. Because aging is not automatically linked to diseases and other impairments “people don’t realise that these problems are related to things that we can change, that are reversible”. Even making lifestyle changes influences healthy aging, as studies show, without any biohacking or reprogramming.

But the investment hype for living longer is real and gives the savvy investor another opportunity.