Funding Life-Extension Research

While the worldwide trend in life expectancy continues to increase slightly overall, the trend for the last few decades in developed countries is that more people are spending more years in poor health with multiple chronic comorbidities. These chronic conditions in aging populations consume high proportions of national healthcare budgets. The relatively young field of longevity research, after accumulating insights into the mechanisms of aging and producing dramatic laboratory demonstrations of life extension in some organisms, is entering the translational phase. This phase, through clinical trials, will confirm or refute the "geroscience hypothesis" that drugs can change the trajectory of the processes of aging within cells, and ultimately in living humans. At the same time, traditional funding patterns do not favor such visionary "moonshot" research, which, despite the potential for ultimately providing benefits for everyone, offers little prospect for rapid return on investment and high probabilities for early phase failure. New radical funding strategies incentivizing innovation will have to be called into play.