Abstract
Iam writing this a few days after the 10th anniversary of the founding of SENS Research Foundation (SRF), and in the 20th anniversary year of the founding of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. As the world's two most prominent nonprofit bodies focused on the biology of aging, we have both found ourselves in a highly gratifying new position in recent years: our ability to sponsor research with charitable and public funds has increasingly become augmented by the option of working with the private sector, especially in the form of angel investors and venture capitalists, to attract funding for translational gerontology research on a scale that already greatly exceeds what we could muster hitherto. This is greatly accelerating that research, undoubtedly saving huge number of lives in the future.
What, then, is the remaining role of nonprofits in rejuvenation biotechnology? The mechanism for bringing investment money to bear on our research is to spin projects out into startup companies, so that the investors have a clear route to eventual profit. Should we simply “declare victory” and shut up shop? I can, of course, speak concretely only for SRF in this, but we work very closely with the Buck (as well as with other smaller nonprofits in this space) and I am confident that the essence of what I have to say applies quite accurately elsewhere.
The most important and obvious continuing role for biomedical research charities in the antiaging sector is to pursue those areas of research that, while being just as vital for the future health of the elderly as the areas that are now receiving substantial private-sector funding, are not yet far enough along on the path to proof of concept to present a clear value proposition to investors. Rejuvenation biotech is, by its nature, a divide-and-conquer approach to tackling the health problems of old age; investors, by contrast, tend to prefer companies to adopt a narrow focus and to zero in on potential patient groups who will benefit from individual therapies. Although the benefits of combining such therapies will certainly emerge and be appreciated in due course, we are not there yet. This means that there is an undiminished need for the nonprofit sector to pursue those more challenging areas: they are simply too tangential to the focus of the companies that are currently leading the rejuvenation charge.
The eventual need to combine therapies is, in fact, an argument in its own right for why nonprofits in this space must continue to thrive if we are to defeat aging as soon as possible. Combination therapy is not popular with the medical profession; medics like to keep things simple, because there is always the risk of unanticipated deleterious interactions. The best way to anticipate those interactions is to combine interventions in model organisms, giving us the chance to resolve them before they slow us down in the clinic. That is a research theme that should be getting going already, and no one is going to do it except the nonprofit sector.
The case for philanthropic efforts in rejuvenation biotech goes beyond research. One component of SRF's work in which I take particular pride is our education arm, whose main activity is a summer internship program for undergraduates. The youngsters who have come through this program have been absolutely stellar, routinely described by the professors with whom we place them as the best they have ever had the good fortune to host. The program is among the top few most competitive in the country, with an astonishing 2% acceptance rate—yes, in a typical year we receive 50 times more applicants than we can accept with our available budget. Any of you who sit on study sections with a 10% payline will be painfully aware that the choice between the grants you fund and the next 10% is a blatant lottery. In our case, that means we could add an entire digit to our education budget and the number of kids we accept, without any perceptible loss of quality. And undeniably, education is a job for the nonprofit sector.
Finally, let us not forget advocacy. It is all very well that I and other high-profile members of the antiaging research community spend our lives on stage and on camera, doing our utmost to educate the world concerning the work we are doing and the value it has to humanity—but it quite clearly is not enough. The public—and, therefore, their elected decision-making representatives—overwhelmingly remain resistant to these arguments; their inaction is costing future lives, both by slowing research now and by impeding the essential forward planning that could promote a smooth and rapid dissemination of these life-saving therapies once they arrive. The only way to change that is to engage opinion formers and lobbyists on a far greater scale than has yet occurred. And again, that is a job for nonprofits.
In sum, we can be very happy that progress in many areas of this crusade has greatly accelerated in recent years, but we cannot be complacent. The nonprofits who got us this far still have a huge and utterly vital role to play going forward. I am delighted that many of the leading investors in rejuvenation biotech startups share that view, and are donating to organizations such as SRF and the Buck at the same time as investing in companies such as those that we are spinning out. I encourage all investors to follow that lead. It makes sense from a narrow investment perspective, as it is the best way to gain access to the early data that may motivate being the founding investor in the next spinout; but, as I have outlined earlier, it makes sense on many more levels than that.