Why We Invested in Elevian
Amazing team, science, and market potential!
The Prime Movers Lab partners and broader family have been deeply interested in aging and longevity for some time now. We agree with the WSJ, and too imagine a future in which medications could be taken by healthy people to forestall a range of aging-related illnesses. And this future is far closer than previously thought. Our advisors are among the world’s leading experts in the space and we are all thrilled to have led a $15mm financing in Elevian. As investors, the prospect at partnering with entrepreneurs to “reimagine aging” is extremely compelling. Age is the highest correlated risk factor for most chronic diseases and when you couple that with the fact that chronic diseases make up 95% of all Medicare spending, just imagine the potential for impact on both individual lives and healthcare economics.
Many of you likely remember the provocative experiment, performed years ago, of an old and young mouse being stitched together and exchanging blood via parabiosis. The “reversal” of aging observed when old mice were exposed to “young blood” caught significant press attention at the time. Well those results have since been well reproduced and, putting, the vampire jokes aside, have profound implications for treatment of chronic diseases. What the Elevian scientific founders and Harvard Professors Amy Wagers, Richard Lee, and Lee Rubin did was identify GDF11 as a blood-borne factor responsible for these effects in mice. They found the needle in the haystack of blood that can be scaled up into a therapeutic.
Founder and seasoned CEO Mark Allen MD has a great, bold vision balanced with practicality in clinical need and strong scientific rigor. The better part of a decade of Academic research went into the core tech before Elevian was founded in 2017. Elevian’s lead indication is ischemic stroke, a debilitating disease that impacts over 650,000 a year in the US alone. This regulatory strategy makes a lot of sense for a startup for capital efficiency, However, their preclinical data shows GDF11 has promising efficacy for diabetes, obesity and other indications. With the foundational patent estate in hand, Elevian is poised for a robust therapeutic pipeline and partnering opportunities.
So coming back to why we invested in Elevian. Because the fundamental understanding of implications of GDF11’s role in aging our body aligned with massive economic impact, guided by the steady hands of a top notch, battle-tested management team.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.
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