Prevention Is Better Than Cure
Adrian Rüther of Ananda Impact Ventures, looks at the longevity market, and how a new wave of diagnostics start-ups could help us to lead both longer and healthier lives.
Helping people to live more fulfilling lives is at the heart of impact investing, so it should come as no surprise that one of the areas of research and innovation that Ananda is interested in is longevity.
Yet by ‘longevity’, we don’t just mean extending the amount of time that people remain alive — more importantly, it’s about enabling our lives to be healthier for longer. Why extend life if it just means extra years of ill-health and suffering at the end? Instead, we’re interested in ways to keep the human body and brain in good condition for as long as possible.
Being healthy — both physically and mentally — obviously has a huge impact on the general quality of our lives. Yet traditionally, medical science has been more focused on treatment — of diseases, injury, physical conditions etc. — than on prevention. It left individuals to effectively fend for themselves during life’s journey, only intervening to patch them up when something went wrong.
However, there has been a significant shift in recent years towards safeguarding people’s health and trying to head off illness and injury before they occur. It’s been a truism for a long time that “prevention is better than cure”, and that’s the idea which is driving a whole new wave of innovation in the health and life sciences sectors.
The social impact of good health
While preventative medicine and measures have always existed, there is a growing recognition that societies must focus more on keeping their populations healthy throughout their lifetimes. As living standards improve around the world, and people live longer as a consequence, the proportion of countries’ populations continuing into old age is increasing. If health systems and hospitals are not to become overwhelmed by age-related diseases and ailments, it is vital that preventive solutions are widely available to all.
The social impact of a comprehensive strategy of prevention is clear. Statistics show that the majority of age-related diseases — such as dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular issues — affect lower income households the most. While lifestyle and situational factors are part of the problem, lack of access to preventative measures also has a major bearing on this issue. If that trend could be reversed at a systemic level, this would make a significant contribution to the levelling up of societies.
There are practical benefits as well. By staying healthier for longer, people are also able to be more productive, extending their economic contribution to society, while avoiding the associated costs and physical/mental burden that ill-health leads to. And enabling a higher quality of life for populations through an improved health span makes for better social cohesion and an increased sense of well-being. If we truly believe that citizens have a right to the pursuit of happiness, then surely part of that pursuit must be to lead healthier lives for longer.
Diagnostics is key to longevity
There are various disciplines and categories associated with longevity, from gene therapy to aging supplements, but the area that Ananda is particularly interested in — and which fits most closely with the preventative ideal outlined above — is diagnostics.
We define players in the diagnostics sector as being any company that is involved in the development of a biomarker that identifies or signals damage or health changes which could cause or accelerate diseases/conditions associated with aging. Examples of such solutions include aging clocks, biomarker panels and microbiome testing.
The core of diagnostics is the ongoing measurement of bodily functions, giving the user greater visibility into their physical condition and what their body needs to remain healthy, whether that is something as simple as more exercise and/or sleep, or a prompt to seek medical advice. By producing their own data, people not only have greater agency and sense of control over their health, but can bypass the initial testing/diagnosis stage they would normally go through when consulting with a doctor etc.
In other words, these solutions give people a proactive and preventative heads-up regarding potential health issues, enabling them to be treated earlier or nipped in the bud altogether, all of which contributes to improved health span and greater longevity.
The diagnostics market is rapidly developing
While the Apple Watch and its various health/wellness applications is at the moment what most people think of regarding personal health monitoring, diagnostics solutions tend to go deeper than this type of device. For example, aging clocks use a blood sample to measure the fundamental biology of aging at a molecular level, while microbiome testing measures indicative changes in microbial gut species via a fecal sample. Importantly, both of these solutions are relatively cheap to produce and use.
Age-related diagnostics is a market with both huge financial and impact potential. As an indication of this, $589 million was raised in 2021 for biological age diagnostics companies. And while the focus in this area has tended to be on B2C products, 81% of age diagnostics solutions are sold B2B, with longevity clinics and insurance companies increasingly being lucrative customers for such products.
There are numerous start-ups in this area that are worth watching. One example is Humanity, a UK-based company with an app designed to help slow or even reverse the user’s rate of aging. It calculates rate of aging and biological age by drawing on data from the user’s smartphone plus wearable devices to track biomarkers such as heart rate, step rate, sleep, and activity. Already past the seed stage, Humanity has an upcoming $13 million series A round planned.
Another start-up to watch is GlycanAge, also a UK company, whose solution can calculate a person’s biological age using glycan analysis. It not only offers an accurate insight into the current state of the user’s health, but provides a powerful tool to make informed decisions about lifestyle choices and behavioral changes. GlycanAge currently has a $5 million seed round planned.
Ultimately, Ananda believes that longevity is not only about adding years to life, but also adding life to those years. We also believe that longevity, which for too long as been regarded as the preserve of the wealthier sections of society, is ready to become a mainstream area of investment and innovation. In addition, the need for us all to lead more sustainable lives in the face of climate change has already encouraged many people to focus on healthier lifestyles — the next step is to proactively monitor that ambition, with diagnostics solutions key to ensuring we’re all on the right path.
Are you the founder of a diagnostics start-up, or know one that might be of interest? If so, please feel free to get in touch.
