Deep-dive into the Longevity Industry reveals how AI, deep learning tech and science are inspiring fight against aging, and disrupting healthcare.

The Global Longevity Consortium, an amalgamation of the Biogerontology Research Foundation, Deep Knowledge Life Sciences, Aging Analytics Agency and Longevity.International platform, have released a landmark 650-page analytical report on the Longevity Industry, titled Longevity Industry Landscape Overview Volume II: “The Business of Longevity”, which profiles hundreds of Longevity companies, investors and major players, and summarises an extraordinarily vast and complex landscape into a single comprehensive framework.

Additionally, the report gives a detailed overview of the history of the industry over the past several decades, charts its present-day landscape, and forecasts its future over the next five years. It discusses the major roadblocks facing the industry, and what measures can be taken in order to optimize the fair and rational valuation of its constituent companies in order to avoid a Longevity bubble. Readers can access the full report freely online, or study a shorter Infographic Summary to gain a quick overview of the report’s key themes and trends.

Co-author and editor of the report Dmitry Kaminsky has commented:

“Aging is the ultimate evil. To invest in Anti-Aging technologies is the most ethical business, and to donate to longevity research is the most effective form of altruism. The future of the longevity industry not only has the logical potential to become the wealthiest industry in all of history, but also represents the most ethical way of doing business.” – Dmitry Kaminskiy, Managing Partner of Deep Knowledge Ventures and editor of the report “The Business of Longevity”.

Later chapters in the report give a detailed analysis of how the current frameworks used by government healthcare system, pension funds and insurance companies will inevitably lead to stagnation in the face of demographic aging (AKA the steep rise in the proportion of populations over the age of 65), and how the only way for such entities to avoid national economic turmoil in the decades to come is to reinvent their modes of operation from the ground up, funding research away from reactionary, after-the-fact single disease treatment and toward comprehensive, preventive medicine and healthspan extension.

“It is our hope that these reports, produced by a dedicated team of analysts two years in the making, have an impact in terms of clarifying the broad structure of the multifarious longevity industry, and in unifying many of its fragmented stakeholders under the umbrella of a unifying framework” says co-author and editor Franco Cortese, Deputy Director of the Biogerontology Research Foundation and editor of Volume 1: “The Science of Longevity”.

Chapter 7 of the report, notably, lays the groundwork for a new Longevity financial system that ties health to wealth via tangible, quantifiable metrics like HALY (health-adjusted life years) and QALY (quality-adjusted life years), so that healthcare-impacted financial entities like pension funds and insurance companies can profit from retaining and extending their clients’ healthy longevity, rather than betting against it, and discusses how, in the face of demographic aging, it is the only viable way for existing financial entities to avoid stagnation in the face of massive societal aging. The financial entities of today are operating upon models that are more than a century old, and were designed during an age in which demographic aging nor the extension of healthspan could not have been even imagined, and this creates a fundamental and systemic rift in an age where the extension of QALY and HALY have become possible.

Alex Zhavoronkov, Chief Science Officer of the Biogerontology Research Foundation and a scientific advisor on the Longevity reports, elaborates:

“The way we prioritize projects at Insilico Medicine is by looking at the number of quality-adjusted life years (QALY) each project can generate. It is the most altruistic cause and the most effective investment. If you add just one year of life to everyone on the planet, you generate over 7 billion QALY.” –

This report follows just months after the release of their first 750 page analytical report “The Science of Longevity” (i.e., Longevity and aging research in academia). The group have plans to follow up this second report with a series of “special case studies” that look at the Longevity industry in specific geographic regions (the first of which will be “Longevity Industry in UK”), as well as volumes that go into much greater detail on some of the specific topics they covered broadly and globally in their first two reports.

“This trend of longevity science and longevity-oriented life-sciences startups becoming mainstream also signals a coming paradigm shift from treatment of the symptoms of disease in a palliative and ineffective way toward the actual treatment of the underlying biological root cause of such diseases at their very source – a shift away from treatment and toward prevention. It seeks to treat the root cause and largest risk factor for what is increasingly becoming the most prevalent category of disease afflicting humanity today, namely age-related disease. The treatment of age-related disease at its source, aging itself, is going to be the biggest thing to happen to healthcare since sanitation, in terms of improved clinical outcomes for some of the most quantitatively prevalent diseases afflicting humanity today.” – Franco Cortese, Deputy Director of the Biogerontology Research Foundation and editor of Volume 1: “The Science of Longevity”.

This report certainly makes for interesting reading – a landmark publication perhaps, when it comes to writing the history of the Longevity industry’s journey into the mainstream.

Kaminsky believes that:

“There have been many well documented efforts to predict the future of biomedical progress, but is there any good reason why the same logic could not be applied for the financial sphere? Many thought leaders have made reasoned predictions on how some fragments of collapsing financial systems will evolve, adapt and adjust to increasing life expectancy. We should work to assemble the framework of scenarios regarding the evolution of financial system in the next 10 years, and create the pathways that will be able to neutralise collapses and accelerate the dynamic of progress of the longevity industry, with a focus on extension of healthy period of life for the betterment of all of humanity.”