Right now, the average American lives for about 80 years.

And the question is, how long could we live?

We actually don't know the answer to that.

This question is at the center

of the burgeoning field of longevity science,

and biotech startups believe we are closer than ever

to unprecedented lifespan.

A recent explosion of longevity startups

has created a new speculative industry almost overnight.

Oxford economics estimated longevity

to be worth $7.6 trillion.

In order to reach its potential, right,

really needs to have a way of getting to the market

as fast as we can possibly do it.

[Narrator] But some fear whatever breakthrough may happen

will never really serve the average person.

Rather, it will favor the few who are sinking their fortunes

into these startups.

It's a pretty concentrated group of investors.

From our estimates,

it's like nearly 50% has come from individuals.

That's a nicer way of saying billionaires.

I have to be honest,

a large part is egoistic because the billionaires

they are getting older and they have a lot of money

and they still have a lot of ambitions.

They want to live longer when they age better.

When people think about longevity,

the thing that comes to mind is usually, you know,

some eccentric billionaire trying to live forever.

But what longevity really is

is just the science of helping us live longer.

And also the science of helping us live more healthfully.

Anything that comes out of this space

won't be just for the rich.

Humans have been trying to cheat death

since we climbed down from the trees.

The Fountain of Youth was a mythical place

where you could drink waters from its springs

to rejuvenate your aging body.

It first appeared in writing around the fifth century BC

and the search hasn't stopped since.

Folklore has it that Spanish Explorer Ponce de Leon searched

in vain for magical waters with restorative powers

in modern day Florida and The Bahamas.

But historians agree that most of his time

was actually spent searching

for something a bit more earthly.

Not only was he searching for gold,

but expeditions like his were expensive and in constant need

of fundraising from the throne across the Atlantic.

Today, the modern quest for prolonged youth

remains very expensive.

Last year, more than $2 billion in venture funding

went into the longevity space.

So this is a space that people are excited about

and they are putting their money into it.

But this expedition is funded mostly

by a different sort of royalty.

We have heard recently, you know, that famous people,

such as Jeff Bezos invested, not only millions,

but actually billions into new startup companies.

And I think you know,

it is totally justified this investment.

While this narrative of this super rich

making an elixir of life for themselves at the expense

of the rest of the world world makes

for good Bond villain material,

it doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.

I love it.

The narrative about lots of billionaires

coming into this longevity space,

it's played up more than it needs to be because in general,

like VC funds are backed by billionaires

or families of billionaires.

This is sort of the artery

of the the worldwide innovation economy

is people who have the capital on hand to be able

to do these big, sometimes risky, investments.

I don't think that impression is entirely wrong

but it's also not fully correct.

And it really fails to recognize the ways in which

the edges of human knowledge and capacity

are always explored on the outskirts

by a handful of individuals

who are uniquely motivated and uniquely resourced.

It never happens with technology that somehow that

that then stays secretive

and closed up in a box and only effective for them.

As it turns out the science of pharmacology

and even the basic laws of supply and demand

don't really allow for an elite super drug.

That first pill that you create or that first injection

or whatever it is that might cost, you know,

$500 million to make that first pill.

The second one probably cost a fraction of a penny.

And so if you were to do the math

of like the supply and demand aspects of this,

it doesn't make sense to make a really expensive medicine

that only a few billionaires take

when you can make something really cheap

but make it for everybody.

And there's another reason

why private billionaires and VC's are flooding this space.

As it turns out, longevity health doesn't exactly fit

into the current healthcare model

making it risky and more complicated

to traditional pharmaceutical investors.

The major regulatory bodies that look at states

of disease, so the CDC, the FDA,

they don't consider death an illness.

Of all of the clinical endpoints that we generally look at

therapeutics alleviating the suffering of humans,

interestingly, death isn't one of them.

Many people, very accurately,

particularly as we live longer and healthier lives,

are pausing and saying, well, wait,

why do I wait to get involved

with the healthcare system until I'm sick?

And why is there no baseline of what being healthy is?

There have been a lot of people with resources,

i.e. billionaires, who are saying,

I know the best practices for living long and healthy lives

but what are the treatments to alleviate some

of these symptoms of aging?

And all the classic investors in the space said,

I don't really know how to fathom that.

I don't know what to do

with these kind of soft clinical endpoints.

And I absolutely don't know how to invest on the metric

of you make an investment today,

you engage with a therapeutic practice,

and then hopefully we find out in 50 years

that you lived 10 healthier years

than you might have otherwise, right?

That feedback loop is way too long.

And that's really what's enabled investors like ourselves

to start participating in this market.

What's more, longevity science itself

challenges much of the healthcare status quo as we know it.

Everyone in the space agrees that for real longevity

to be achieved, there needs to be a massive paradigm shift.

We are locked into a system where we wait

for people to get sick and then try to treat them.

And that system worked really well a hundred years ago

when infectious diseases

were the cause of death for everybody.

If you come in with a heart attack

or with stage three cancer

or with early stage Alzheimer's disease,

so much has already broken down in our bodies

by the time that that doctor is seeing that patient

that it is so complex to imagine how we would fix all

of the pieces that have come apart.

All of these future technologies, these future medicines,

they're built around this idea of prevention.

The notion that we could switch from a healthcare system

that is primarily reactive, wait for someone to get sick,

to one that is more proactive, right?

Give someone a drug so that they could then stay healthy.

So a more technically accurate term for a longevity drug

would be a multi-disease preventative,

something that can keep you from getting cancer

or Alzheimer's disease or having a heart attack.

The amazing potential of this science

is that we could have a single drug

that makes all of those things happen

further in the future than they would otherwise have.

As of today, a single longevity drug remains

as real as the Fountain of Youth and experts agree

that regardless of the technology,

longevity is a multi-pronged effort using everything

from biomarkers and cellular rejuvenation to gene editing,

diet, and exercise.

There will likely never be a one-size-fits-all solution.

And to accomplish this

longevity startups are taking an interdisciplinary approach

to the science.

Scientists have really started breaking down all

of the little things that happen to us as we age.

And there are a lot of them,

but I like to break them down into three categories.

Our top category is stuff that happens

at the whole tissue level.

We call it like changes in how our tissues are put together.

We have stem cells that get exhausted as we age

and now they can't make new copies of themselves.

And then if you zoom in into the cell,

there are changes that happen at the molecular level,

specific molecules that can't be broken down

by our normal recycling mechanisms that build up

little by little as we get older.

The business model of these startups

largely mirror this diverse approach, casting a wide net

across both academic science and pharmacology.

It's kind of a new model

where you don't focus on one single technology

or one single therapeutic area

because longevity is a very complex approach

where many biological mechanisms

are interacted and intertwined.

So we'd like to have the scientists interacting

with each other

even though they have a specific scientific fields.

We have like an incubator space.

We bring in a cutting-edge science.

We collaborate with academic leaders in the field

and we bring in scientific entrepreneurs

to bring this breakthrough science into our labs

here in Zurich.

So we have labs and offices

and then we have very experienced traditional pharma.

People who know how to discover and develop drugs

in this completely novel field.

Where we find a great scientist

who has made a great discovery, bring it into Cambrian,

and then use the fact that we have a team of chemists

and drug developers and researchers, and you know,

people who understand the biotech market and all of this

to foster that internally.

This aggregation model helps biotechs

hedge their bets against an admittedly high-risk venture.

Drug development is risky, right?

So when you start a drug in clinical trials or human trials,

you only have about a one in seven chance of that drug

making it all the way through.

It's three phases of clinical trials to approval.

But if you pull together 20 of these different ideas

into one entity and resource them all,

then all of a sudden that risk goes up to about a 95% chance

that you'll get at least one hit.

And so the math of drug development makes a lot more sense

as a collective than as individuals.

Even with so many bets on the table,

there's no guarantee that a breakthrough will happen

under their roof.

Recently, a study funded through traditional grants

out of the Salk Institute successfully extended

the lifespan of mice.

And while mouse studies are not

considered breakthrough discoveries,

it has gotten the attention of the scientific community.

We developed an approach called partial reprogramming.

Basically where we express a set of genes

which can actually reprogram the cells

without losing their identity.

We were able to erase the signs of aging.

We were able to extend its life by 30% almost.

So basically this kind of demonstrates