News — "I'm a firm believer, and as I know you are, when you put several 100 scientists collectively working in a connected manner in the world, not in any one country, but in the world, from the west to the east, to solve a common challenge, that is how you put a man on the moon. That is your moonshot. That is what it will take, because a man in the room was not put there by a single scientist side in a single individual or a hero. It is not heroes that we are developing. It is the future of this collective wisdom that we're actually investing behind, because it's going to take the village, not a hero. It's going to take leaders to inspire that village to take this on, and that is the leadership that's going on at Hevolution. Let me give you a little peek into the things that we're looking at."
- Dr. Mehmood Khan, CEO of Hevolution
"So, my approach to innovation is - innovation is an invention that changes the lives of people, that's when it becomes an innovation."
- Dr. Mehmood Khan
“So, what’s the economic domino effect we can expect? First, we’ll be able to reduce healthcare costs. Healthcare spending is skyrocketing worldwide, so this is a crucial and, I believe, immediate impact. Second, we can tackle the workforce challenge we’re seeing today, with many people dropping out of the workforce. If we’re able to extend healthspan, people can live—and work—longer, in good health. Another important point is social pressure. Many women, for example, leave the workforce because they are the primary caregivers for sick family members. By extending healthspan, we can support and encourage women to remain in the workforce. Most importantly, we need to look to the future.”
- HRH Dr. Haya Al Saud, SVP of Research at Hevolution
"I do not believe there is an example, other than maybe mass polio vaccine campaigns, where the public sector can, on its own, democratize something. Every example I can think of in democratization has happened because the private sector figured out how to get something into the hands of as many people as possible, because they’re incentivized to increase the market. They are naturally incentivized. That's not a bad thing. I think the private sector has a critical role in democratization. And every technology I’ve looked at to try and understand over the last 50 years of democratization, government invented the internet, the private sector scaled it, and then leveraged it for core commerce."
- Dr. Mehmood Khan
“The number of older people above 60 is going to double by 2050, from 1.1 billion to 2.1 billion, and that we'll have more people soon above 60 than under 10."
"Life expectancy is increasing, but the health span is actually worsening. The increase in healthy life expectancy is not following the same pace as life expectancy overall."
"Women on average, live longer than men, but spend also more years in poor health than men, and between 2002 and 2019 we've seen that this health span gap between men and women has also increased."
"Around 45% of cases of dementia could be prevented by addressing 14 modifiable risk factors across the life course, including early education, hearing loss, high LDL cholesterol during adulthood, and social isolation later in life."
"Evidence is showing that intrinsic capacity is a better predictor of survival and care dependency than just looking at disease alone."
"It’s important for us to address healthy aging, and 80% of all older people living in low and middle-income countries that we have the right data and the right kind of research being conducted in these countries."
- Dr Anshu Banerjee, Director for the Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing, at the World Health Organization (all from his session: Healthspan for all - A pipedream?)
Quotes about investment strategy for healthspan:
“Let’s really invest in translation, since there's a valley of death between interesting laboratory observation and something that seems to actually impact health. That is whether it’s biologic observation, a physical observation, chemical observation, or even a sociological observation. So what's the taxonomy of translation, what is the outcome that we're looking for that will actually make humans into big mice. For the purpose of actually predicting an outcome, we need to invest in that. It is time to start looking at companies that are combining data, interpretation of data and biologic observations. The question is how do we get things delivered to people? We have to put [information and technology] into the context of our healthcare systems and the way our healthcare system works tomorrow, not a fantasy one of the future.”
- Dr. William Greene, Chief Investment Officer at Hevolution Foundation
"A drug that actually makes you live longer and happier—that’s not a drug that can be developed realistically. There’s no regulatory path for this, and there's nobody that's going to take at risk at a 5- or 10-year study, just hoping that that's the outcome. You have to have something near-term in terms of biomarkers or, most importantly, validated surrogate endpoints [..]that are linked to high-evidence of long-term benefit.”
- Dr. Srinivas Akkaraju, Founder and Managing General Partner at Samsara BioCapital
“I think if you're trying to do genomic management, or something that's purely preventative, commercial models are very challenging, but if you can start from a state of disease and walk all the way back to state of youthful health, then I think that is really promising.”
- Dr. Jarod Rutledge, experienced biotech investor and Biomarkers Lead at the Amaranth Foundation
Quotes about GLP-1 drugs:
“Yeah, I think at the early stage, we're definitely seeing more. I went to a few lifespan extension and healthspan extension specific events, and they were always really packed with a lot more builders and also more investment than we've seen in the past. So I think there's a ton of energy at the early stage, and, of course, at the late stage, everybody's excited about the GLP ones and thinking maybe this will kind of help push things forward.”
- Dr. Jarod Rutledge, biomarkers lead at the Amaranth Foundation
"If all of us in this room, within three or four or five years, can prove that with GLP-1s you can extend healthy lifespan it will actually the first healthy lifespan increasing drug available. So it’s going to totally change the world." “It's also going to totally change the way we can think about how can we intervene in very fundamental mechanisms. If you had told me that you would take something that has an effect in the brain and all over the body, and it's perfectly safe and it actually makes you live longer, I would have said, no way. But that's exactly what a GLP-1 is.”
- Dr. Christoph Westphal, co-founder and General Partner of Longwood Fund
"The GLP drugs are an incredible class, providing key lessons for investment. A drug that shows measurable effects in a modest time with a modest number of patients can lead to longer studies for confirmation. For healthspan, the key lesson is finding near- to medium-term measurements that de-risk the investment. As investors, we focus on high-risk opportunities and aim to lower that risk, which increases value and reduces capital costs. To succeed, we need data from a modest trial that proves value and attracts further investment. A super safe drug with long-term benefits may not be funded, so we need to focus on near-term, disease-oriented solutions that can be expanded."
- Dr. Srinivas Akkaraju, Founder and Managing General Partner at Samsara BioCapital
Links to GHS recordings:
Day 1 (February 4):
Day 2 (February 5):
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